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Leon Craig
Leon Craig is a writer and editor based in Berlin. She has written for the TLS, the Literary ReviewAnother Gaze and the London Magazine among others. Her queer gothic short story collection Parallel Hells is published by Sceptre Books and she is currently working on her first novel The Decadence.

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Cosy Violence

BOOK REVIEW

June 2023

LEON CRAIG

BOOK REVIEW

June 2023

The 22 year old Australian narrator of K Patrick’s sensuous, subversive debut novel is a long way from home. A matron at an unnamed...

FICTION

September 2021

Lick the Dust

LEON CRAIG

FICTION

September 2021

When you misplace something in the library here, it stays lost for a very long time. The eighteenth-century catalogue...

Like so much of the dialogue that marks time across Lars Iyer’s books, this conversation began in the pub Of course, given the Dictaphone on the table it wasn’t really a conversation at all, but as the afternoon wore on the chat became more freewheeling As in Iyer’s books, topics bounced from the exhilarating to the banal – from music, sex, and work, to unprintable anecdotes, unrealised projects, and work By this point the recorder was off but we continued via email to follow up some of those incoherent, half-remembered thoughts   Iyer’s latest novel Exodus is the finale of the ‘Lars and W’ trilogy, which began with Spurious in 2011 The novels are based on Iyer’s life as an academic in the UK, and by now the fiction has nearly caught up with its reality – just as Iyer’s Spurious emerged from a collective blog, in Exodus Lars and W start up their own blog which collapses under the weight of Lars’s continuous updates (We might hope for a future trilogy in which ‘Lars’ writes Spurious, Dogma and Exodus all over again) Iyer has said that Exodus is his attempt at a ‘big book, a comic Book of Revelations’, and religiosity and end-times abound – everything from Vedic scripture to Rastafarian eschatology – as the lecturer-heroes embark on their own uncertain exodus into the desert of neoliberal Britain   In 2011, The White Review published Iyer’s ‘Nude in Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss’, a manifesto against literature and against manifestos Its bleakly funny provocation reminded me of a scene from the Simpsons – a call to ‘prove me wrong kids … prove me wrong’   At the same time, in calling for a literature that addresses its own marginality, it seemed hopeful A recurring motif in Iyer’s work is to think against a doomed situation from within – the suburbs, Britain, the apocalypse – and his books suggest a similar escape, a way out of literature through literature It’s true that Iyer’s fiction can be glossed pretty quickly – following some of the best traditions of twentieth century art, not a lot happens

CONTRIBUTOR

April 2016

Leon Craig

CONTRIBUTOR

April 2016

Leon Craig is a writer and editor based in Berlin. She has written for the TLS, the Literary Review, Another Gaze and the London Magazine among...

ART REVIEW

April 2019

Oscar Wilde Temple, Studio Voltaire

LEON CRAIG

ART REVIEW

April 2019

The light is dim, the air richly scented. Little purple tea lights flicker in the votive candle rack and...

[Getting] Down with Gal Pals

FEATURE

November 2018

LEON CRAIG

FEATURE

November 2018

There’s a moment in Laura Kaye’s underrated novel English Animals when the protagonist Mirka, sitting in the village bar with her married lover, notices...
Mute Canticle

PRIZE ENTRY

April 2016

LEON CRAIG

PRIZE ENTRY

April 2016

Giulio the singing fascist came to pick me up from the little airport in his Jeep. He made sure to come round and hold...

READ NEXT

Interview

January 2016

Interview with Fiston Mwanza Mujila

Roland Glasser

Interview

January 2016

Roof terrace of the Shangri-La hotel, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, USA; late afternoon, 8 October 2015. We ensconce ourselves in...

Interview

Issue No. 11

Interview with Alice Oswald

Max Porter

Interview

Issue No. 11

Alice Oswald is a British poet who lives in Devon with her family. Newspaper profiles will inevitably mention the...

feature

November 2015

Streets of Contradiction

feature

November 2015

Jerusalem has a remarkably cohesive identity, in architectural terms. Every building, from the Western Wall to the sleek hotels...

 

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