Mailing List


David Isaacs
David Isaacs has recently completed a PhD about the ethics of rewriting at UCL. He is coming to the end of a first novel and is at the early stages of a new project about the present tense.


Articles Available Online


Interview with Namwali Serpell

Interview

December 2020

David Isaacs

Interview

December 2020

Namwali Serpell is a rarity: an academic and novelist whose criticism is as vital as her fiction. Since we first spoke, in September 2020,...

Book Review

June 2018

Christine Schutt’s ‘Pure Hollywood’

David Isaacs

Book Review

June 2018

There is a certain kind of American novelist of the late twentieth century whose fiction fetishises plant names. The...

Day 1 in the Season before Chaos   These were the days before the glitch The weather was acutely neurotic, four seasons compressed into one week, then a week of endless rain, then another four seasons compressed into the following week, then the sweltering days that promised summer in November and the carpet of snow that covered the early daffodils The future bionic woman didn’t have a chip incrusted on her cranium yet She had no idea chance was about to randomise her existence She had no idea what the future had in store for her She didn’t know she was going to become a cyborg She didn’t know a quantum leap was about to snatch her up She knew nothing There were no signs foretelling a prolonged holiday from her usual self, just the habitual vicissitudes of climate change and the average sweet and sour twang of global city life   She had made a few adjustments to her life, though   She was ready to start a new phase   On the 28th November 02, she had highlighted the word ‘orgasmic’ from a book about dreams It wasn’t a word she necessarily related to sex or to the feel the advertising industry attaches to the surface of its products It was a word she associated with discovering ecstatic pleasure in unsuspected things, jouissance She had printed the word in Adventure Subtitles N Bold lower-case size font 16, cut out the A4 paper into a third and placed the big note on the wall above her PC:     orgasmic     She wanted to tune into the orgasmic side of life Choose her own parameters Dodge life’s drudgery or at least minimize its impact It would require constant effort and vigilance, it was a juggling act that wouldn’t always be easy Daily mortifications were always around the corner But she now had a new project She had decided to seek out beauty in everyday life In a way, she thought about it as modern life’s heroism, or should we say ‘postmodern’ life’s heroism Deleting urban jungle fallout in one stroke, postponing it, isolating it, absconding from the A to Z   Not

Contributor

August 2014

David Isaacs

Contributor

August 2014

David Isaacs has recently completed a PhD about the ethics of rewriting at UCL. He is coming to the end...

Prize Entry

April 2017

Pylons

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2017

Once upon a time, Dad would begin, I think, focusing on the road, there was a man called Watt....

Seasickness

Prize Entry

April 2016

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2016

‘How would you begin?’   She puts a finger to her lips, a little wrinkled still from the water, and hesitates. She says, ‘Maybe:...
How things are falling.

Prize Entry

April 2015

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2015

i.   Oyster cards were first issued to members of the British public in July 2003; by June 2015 they will have been replaced...
by Accident

fiction

April 2014

David Isaacs

fiction

April 2014

[To be read aloud]   I want to begin – and I hope I don’t come across as autistic or anything like that (and...

READ NEXT

poetry

January 2012

Picasso (1964)

Campbell McGrath

poetry

January 2012

A canvas comprises a totality of surface just as Spain is composed of constituent parts, Catalunya, Madrid, hills and...

fiction

July 2015

Scropton, Sudbury...

Jessie Greengrass

fiction

July 2015

My parents were grocers. For twenty-five years they owned a shop with a green awning and crates of vegetables...

feature

April 2017

Symbols Made Me Hardcore

Joe Bucciero

feature

April 2017

‘A Sound System, like the property of any system, is the interaction of the sum of its parts.’ —...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required