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Leon Craig
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 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...

who bravely blasts their breath through the horn flares of gloomy streets, into dripping construction trailers, dropped by the dead, the dull anxiety of homeowners, clutching sausage and cookies under their arms   phalanges rattle over a piano smashed in the Winter Palace I am only dreaming this, only dreaming   hare krishnas shaved like newly-weds push through the cotton frost   * an oblate antifascist in the metro crush secretly broadcasts through his horn with blood   a coded sound – a French horn, in comes an orchestra of autists in magic carriages to the cackling of iron actors and the chatter of the auction   a sale on scorched backwater ontology in the slime of pudenda I am only dreaming this, only dreaming   * cloudy beer without foam, where god lives in the uncanny consciousness of poets hovering over a supper of bread alone and world news, grunting in wonder:   look it’s snowing, tucking away the ashes in ovens and vases with care   sitting turkish-style (or indian-style, as you lot say) online you broadcast something from the loudspeaker of opposition, like a lackey, with restless glances into worn lacunas,   * into the cartography of the place – right here, syria moves fast along the fingernail’s edge, turkey’s stuffing bombardments down its throat, and in its breast france’s flywheel spins, here a steel voice gnaws through the frame of leviathan, that drunk crocodile…   winter diary: I came to you to find freedom, to take you by the hand, to take in your last warmth you won’t say no to one last meeting, will you?   * Lenin flows by fast   in the statuary stillness of private meetings, private unions, Lenin’s speech hangs over this place like a butcher’s apron sanitized with bleach   pigs squealing, cutting through Nevsky Prospect dull eyes,    and a knot of new year’s snakes on a head without a face a black Škoda and half a body fallen half way out – at the breast on the Field of Mars   the butcher’s ballet and the icy swings of tear-stained acid trips, covering the eternal flame

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

Art

August 2016

False shadows

Izabella Scott

Art

August 2016

The ‘beautiful disorder’ of the Forbidden City and the Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfection and Light) was first noted by...

feature

April 2017

The White Review Short Story Prize 2017 Shortlist (US & Canada)

feature

April 2017

click on the title to read the story   1,040 MPH by Alexander Slotnick   Abu One-Eye by Rav...

fiction

January 2014

Vertical Motion

Can Xue

TR. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping

fiction

January 2014

We are little critters who live in the black earth beneath the desert. The people on Mother Earth can’t...

 

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