We are excited to announce the launch of The White Review No. 13 at Magma Books, Covent Garden on Thursday 26 March. The event will begin at 6.30 p.m.; there will be drinks.

The White Review No. 13 opens with an interview with poet and novelist BEN LERNER, touching on what it means for art to be politically engaged and the potential of writing to defeat time. Painter LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE discusses the confluence of technique and feeling in her portraiture, while novelist MICHEL FABER talks about love, loss and language.

The possibility of ever capturing individual character in art is a theme of the issue, one taken up by painter LUKE RUDOLF and the Japanese photographer DAISUKE YOKOTA in two series reproduced within. New forms, and new grammars, are characteristic of the celebrated work of JORIE GRAHAM – featured here – and the British poet and sound artist HOLLY PESTER.

FEDERICO CAMPAGNA considers whether the new Pope might really be the unlikely saviour of the global Left, while ENRIQUE VILA-MATAS reflects on Roberto Bolano and the ‘times when writers were like gods and lived in the mountains like craven hermits or lunatic aristocrats’. Back in London, JON DAY recounts stories from the curious subculture of the capital’s bicycle couriers and the ‘heroic age’ of cycling,

One of Britain’s most exciting young writers, HELEN OYEYEMI, contributes a new story, and we are delighted to carry a new translation of EDOUARD LEVÉ’s sharp, witty and moving ‘Newspaper’. In an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, PAUL MURRAY presents a Dublin banker whose already unreal lifestyle threatens to fade into fiction.

Image: Daisuke Yokota, ‘Nocturnes’ (2012)