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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.

Articles Available Online


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...

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE PONDERS LOVE   Honey protocols, hear how they mock, snow white and super blue: On the footpaths, we are told, radiators grapple with hydrants and at the marble quarry puss licks her belly until the shag is fluffed Get well cards addressed to third parties The cable car’s driving crank whirrs Here dwells Friedrich Nietzsche On ukulele, recording his propaedeutics in song Huzza, a subcutaneous Alpine ditty Dissimilarity as a religious doctrine The root chord: E minor Robert Walser says Friedrich Nietzsche was not Huh? What? What was I not? You were not loved Hence your resentment The vengeful perfidy of one unloved Meanwhile, new arrivals tuck in to hearty snacks Sausage Berries Poire Williams and Gentian Friedrich Nietzsche and the mild master of remorse converse on stacking chairs Are they onions? Are those contacts – or blows with the fan? Is it a hand-forged bark spud, swathed in camellia oil? We don’t know They speak quietly The mountains’ endless murmur Friedrich Nietzsche ponders love Robert Walser smiles in silence     THE ARBITER’S SICK   Honey protocols, hear how they mock I’m still asleep, they’re fighting already My assistants are whacking each other with hangers and brushes Oh boy, the arbiter’s sick today I see how they batter their limbs, whose workforce is mine, in order, thus squandered, to own themselves at long last Or so the assistants think How wrong they are! Whizz bang, the ankle joint, the nose bone Cat’s tongue, mop and deerfoot OMG Who’ll sew this for me? Who’ll stitch it up? Who’ll fetch and bring back, who’ll support, who’ll transcribe? What do mops and moping have to do with each other? Check it for me! Enough of the fisticuffs! When do we go to print? Assistants, get to work! The theme is: The arbiter’s sick today Let’s go! Mixed dactyls, skipping rhythms, inner universe of middle rhyme Bear me forth and write it all down Realise me in places where I cannot set foot And, while conciliation soon prevails, it’s still lying there, the cuddly toy of my tattooed assistant, who always was my favourite Ah! I’ll never sack a single one     TRANSLATION   Honey protocols, hear how they mock, you translated yourself – didn’t you? – into everything You translated your chemisettes, your crumbs, right on into The Great Glory, where they vanished instead

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

feature

June 2014

A Grenade for River Plate

Juan Pablo Meneses

TR. Jethro Soutar

feature

June 2014

El Polaco appears brandishing his Stanley, as he lovingly calls his pocket knife. Five young hooligans huddle round him...

Prize Entry

April 2015

How things are falling.

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2015

i.   Oyster cards were first issued to members of the British public in July 2003; by June 2015...

Interview

February 2015

Interview with Eddie Peake

Lily Le Brun

Interview

February 2015

Like many people, I had seen Eddie Peake’s penis long before I met the artist himself. For several years...

 

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