Our June online issue features an interview with Canadian artist and writer Moyra Davey As interviewer Hannah Gregory points out, Davey’s photography has a kind of ‘literariness, without any heaviness’, and the artist herself sees photography as ‘a type of reading a reading/writing machine’ In the interview, which is appropriately an epistolary one, she unpacks this relationship, touching on her affinities for walking, Sontag, and Elizabeth Bishop, among others   Also in the issue: an excerpt from Hollow Heart, the second book from Italian novelist Viola Di Grado, who’s work has been lauded as a ‘sophisticated, subtle meditation on language and its failures’; Chris Power tussles with CRPGs in his short story, ‘Gandalf Goes East’; selections from a new series by New York poet Mónica de la Torre; William Watkin considers the cultural history of beheading and imagines Jihadi John as a student in his lecture; and Chelsea Hogue weighs Clayton Cubitt’s Hysterical Literature against the ways ‘sisterhood’ is ‘metastasised as commercial’ in soap adverts   We’ve also featured a selection from Somerset House’s inaugural photography fair, Photo London, including works from such artists as Noemie Goudal, William Klein, and Berenice Abbott At the fair, the John Kobal Foundation residency award for the most outstanding emerging photographer was presented to Daisuke Yokota, featured in The White Review No 13, for ‘his meticulous approach to photographic experimentation, combined at times with visceral performances’   Published at the same time but separate to this month’s online issue is Jennifer Hodgson & Patricia Waugh’s ‘On the Exaggerated Notions of a Decline in British Fiction’ ‘In a culture where all too often literary ‘innovation’ is read as ‘degeneration’, where the experimental novelist is viewed as a case of narcissistic personality disorder, and where the new is identified with a ‘creeping’ cosmopolitanism that dilutes the local produce,’ write Hodgson & Waugh, ‘the very idea of British innovative fiction comes to sound like an oxymoronic supplement – a kind of pharmakon – to the idea of the moronic inferno’ Originally published in The White Review No 7, this essay is now available online, in full, and is essential reading for anyone interested in the state of the British novel
June 2015

online_issue

June 2015

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required