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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’m riding the bus with a group of athletes from some provincial town they’re going to a competition in Milan; our bus has stopped at the border, and waits to go through customs what country are we entering? one of them asks me; Poland, I say so that’s what, the EU? he asks no, I say Poland’s not in the EU yet what other countries are we going through? Germany, I say, Austria he nods Portugal, I lie; he nods again; I could have said Greece, Syria, Ireland—he’d have nodded oh, mighty athlete, our bus will travel through Iceland, we’ll see sheep, deer, muskoxen; we’ll see camels; we’ll see the early ice— hills of not quite solid, not yet formed (they call it ‘uncrystallised’) but very real, early ice; we’ll see the Alps—they’ll be to both sides of us— there’ll be some nice places to cool off; we’ll see the ruins of Thebes, and the remains of mad Alexandria— but we won’t look at any of this; instead we’ll watch movies on our disc players; we’ve been watching movies the whole way from Moscow, one was an American film in which it gradually became clear that using the shampoo Head and Shoulders was the only way to save yourself from the alien invaders (at the end, it turns out the film has actually been an epic shampoo commercial)[1], and just now we watched an old Soviet film about World War II, the action takes place around here somewhere— I am ground, over, over, come in, this is ground, over, the communications officer says, she is a pretty young officer, but no one answers, they’re dead (they’re gone), they’ve been killed, though not before communicating the movement of the Nazi troops, and their impending attack from the northwest, I cried over this ‘I am ground, over, over, come in, this is ground,’ I’d had a lot to drink on the road from Moscow to Minsk, but I would have cried even if I hadn’t had a single drop between Moscow and Minsk; I remembered the poet Lvovsky, who said he cried when he watched Amélie, why did people love this Amélie so much? is it that they’re so hungry for some ordinary magic? it’s silly to explain that people liked it just because they were hungry for magic but there’s no time, and no chance, to explain why they really liked it; there’s a very popular, very stupid new word—positivity (it’s an idiotic

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

February 2013

Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum

Charlie Fox

Interview

February 2013

Perhaps what’s gathered here is not an interview at all. Precisely what it is, we’ll think about in a...

fiction

December 2016

The Giving Up Game

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

fiction

December 2016

The peculiar thing was that Astrid appeared exactly as she did on screen. She was neither taller nor shorter....

feature

June 2016

Heteronormativity and the Single Mother

Jacinda Townsend

feature

June 2016

I.   This spring, in cities and towns all over the United States, schools, churches and other organisations will...

 

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