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Jonathan Gibbs

Jonathan Gibbs was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize 2013. He has since published a novel, Randall or the Painted Grape (Galley Beggar Press).



Articles Available Online


Jessie Greengrass’s ‘Sight’

Book Review

February 2018

Jonathan Gibbs

Book Review

February 2018

Jessie Greengrass’s debut story collection caught my eye with its delightfully extravagant title, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to...

feature

May 2016

Cinema on the Page

Jonathan Gibbs

feature

May 2016

Film is a bully. It wants to make its viewers feel, and it has the tools to do so....

I awoke bathed in perspiration, my teeth clenched Once again, as on countless previous nights, I had been hunted from pillar to post in a dream – shot at, tortured, scalped But on this night, of all nights, the thought occurred to me that I might not be the only one among thousands upon thousands to be condemned to such dreams by the dictatorship   Charlotte Beradt, ‘Dreams under Dictatorship’, Free World (1943)   Born in Berlin in 1907 into a Jewish merchant family, Charlotte Beradt was working as a journalist when the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933 Around this time, she began collecting dreams, slowly compiling a record of the ramifications of Nazi ideology on the unconscious minds of her local community, from doctors and civil servants to students and homemakers Over the course of 6 years, Beradt collected accounts of around 300 individuals’ dreams, a project which ended in 1939 when she fled Germany for the USA   I was reminded of Beradt’s extraordinary project whilst exploring Daria Martin’s Tonight the World, a multi-media installation made in response to a dream diary kept by Martin’s grandmother Susi Stiassni, currently on view at the Barbican Curve Gallery The family, prominent Jewish textile manufacturers, fled their home in Brno in 1938, when Czechoslovakia was on the brink of Nazi occupation Aged only 16 when they left the country, Stiassni went on to keep a dream diary for around 35 years, accumulating some 20,000 pages of material Hers is an acutely personal project: almost too private to engage with as an outsider, and impossibly monumental to comprehend as a whole   Martin’s Tonight the World opens with a videogame that simulates the Stiassni family home in Brno, a modernist villa which still stands today Watching the prerecorded play-through, we are granted a first-person perspective on a faithfully recreated 3D model of the house and garden In the course of the game, the player discovers several artefacts from Martin’s grandmother’s childhood, among them a toy soldier, a locket and a model robot As the player interacts with these objects, specific pages from the

Contributor

August 2014

Jonathan Gibbs

Contributor

August 2014

Jonathan Gibbs was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize 2013. He has since published a novel, Randall or...

The Story I'm Thinking Of

fiction

April 2013

Jonathan Gibbs

fiction

April 2013

There were seven of us sat around the table. Seven grown adults, sat around the table. It was late. We had eaten, and we had...

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Interview

Issue No. 2

Interview with Richard Wentworth

Ben Eastham

Interview

Issue No. 2

Richard Wentworth is among the most influential artists alive in Britain. He emerged in the 1970s as part of...

Interview

September 2015

Interview with Katrina Palmer

Jamie Sutcliffe

Interview

September 2015

G.W.F. Hegel isn’t looking too good. With an afternoon of student tutorials to attend at the School of Sculpture...

poetry

October 2012

Bacon’s Friends

Stephen Devereux

poetry

October 2012

Always got caught out by their shadows: Stuck to their soles like monkeys on trapezes, Cellophane fortune tellers curling...

 

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