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September 2016

online_issue

September 2016

In our lead interview JW McCormack engages Brian Evenson, whose work has variously been described as belonging to the genres of ‘weird’, ‘dark’, and even ‘literary’ fiction, in a conversation on such topics as ‘solipsism, disembodied heartbeats, religious apostasy and the unspeakable’ We soon learn that his work is, like The White Review, ‘more interested in how we think about narrative than in residing in any one genre’ Considering how one creative discipline might inflect another, Kristin Posehn describes the intervention into two characters’ lives of a sculpture by Charles Ray in ‘Boy with Frog’ We’re also pleased to present ‘No Holds Barred’ by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, translated by Brian Hagenbuch, which exemplifies the Guatemalan writer’s ability to weave social commentary, domestic drama, and horror into a single story Three poems by Sarah V Schweig conjure a comparably unsettling combination of the mundane and the menacing The German artist Daniel Sinsel, meanwhile, offers up the possibility that painting might allow some ‘respite’ from the rancour engulfing both sides of the Atlantic In a media landscape skewed by the clamorous proliferation of images, Sinsel speaks about reserving a space for ‘secrets’ and the inner logic of ‘sublimated messages and suppressed desire’ The relationship of culture to society, and its interpretation, is also the subject of Izabella Scott’s appraisal of an ambitious exhibition of contemporary Chinese artists in the British countryside; while Jen Kabat’s impressionistic essay on Bristol’s urban architecture considers how the city’s past is embedded in its present We hope you enjoy

online_issue

August 2016

August 2016

online_issue

August 2016

In our lead interview J.W. McCormack engages Brian Evenson, whose work has variously been described as belonging to the genres of ‘weird’,...

Our latest free online edition features an interview with the Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei, on the  occasion of her solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 Fei talks of her incursions into the virtual cities of Second Life, the misrepresentation of her work by Western art critics, the influence of her father (a socialist realist sculptor) upon her practice, and her collaboration with Asian gangsta rap group, Notorious MSG We’re excited to present a timely and persuasively argued essay on heteronormativity by American novelist Jacinda Townsend, which she defines as the ‘cultural bias in favour of opposite-gendered sexual and marital relationships’, but also more expansively as a prejudice that undergirds a wide range of social and economic structures In a lucid and autobiographical piece, Townsend examines the prevailing rhetoric around single motherhood in the US today Alongside this, we’re publishing an extract from Paul Kingsnorth’s much anticipated novel, Beast (Faber & Faber, July), the second installment in the Buckmaster Trilogy, following a man – Edward Buckmaster – alone on a moor, grappling with the elements and ultimately with himself Kingsnorth’s first novel, The Wake, was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize Elsewhere, Rye Holmboe offers an illuminating essay on sculptor Luke Hart and his installation piece, WALL Recently on show at William Benington Gallery in London, WALL is a lattice of steel held together by sinewy rubber joints; Holmboe takes on the functionality of art and of WALL’s desire for a material realism over representation: the desire to be what it is, and nothing else Finally, we are publishing three new poems by Chloe Stopa-Hunt, part of a sequence entitled Germinal Awarded an Eric Gregory Prize in 2014, Stopa-Hunt’s pamphlet White Hills was recently published by Clinic

online_issue

June 2016

June 2016

online_issue

June 2016

Our latest free online edition features an interview with the Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei, on the  occasion of her solo...

online_issue

March 2016

March 2016

online_issue

March 2016

We are, as ever, excited to bring you our twenty-eighth online issue (we counted last week, on account of it being...

The third annual January translation online issue, edited by Daniel Medin, opens with an interview with the foremost Afrikaans writer of her generation, the novelist, poet, critic and scholar Marlene van Niekerk, whose ‘work casts an unflinching, penetrating regard on post-apartheid South African society, registering beauty and frailty alongside almost unbearable cruelty’ Alongside her, Russian poet Galina Rymbu contributes a long poem, ‘Sex Is a Desert’ We also have new short stories by Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi, a rising star in Latin American fiction; and Indonesian novelist Eka Kurniawan, whose novels Beauty is a Wound and Man Tiger were published last year in English to great critical acclaim   Also representing Asia we’re excited to publish Li Er’s story about Chang’e, goddess of the moon Unrelated but similarly themed, we have an excerpt from Wioletta Greg’s forthcoming novel, ‘The Bees’, and new translations of Monika Rinck’s poems , ‘Three Honey Protocols’ The German language is also represented by Esther Kinsky’s ‘By the River’, a meditative excerpt from her eponymous novel; and Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s astute elegy to Renata Adler’s Speedboat   Elsewhere we have new Ukraine-themed poems by Elena Fanailova; an excerpt from Israeli novelist Nir Baram’s forthcoming Good People, about the NKVD in pre-war Berlin; and a short story by Bulgarian Georgi Gospodinov on the last ever sunset Representing the French language, finally, we’re excited to run a long conversation between Congolese writer and jazz fan Fiston Mwanza Mujila and his translator, Roland Glasser, and Pierre Senges’ manifesto ‘Suite’, a ‘droll demonstration of its author’s daringly agile imagination’
January 2016

online_issue

January 2016

The capacity of art and culture to reach across entrenched social divides is nowhere more disputed than in Jerusalem, a city defined by partition Francesca Wade (winner of the 2015 Tony Lothian Prize for biography) travels to a place in which ‘history, religion, current events are all the same thing’ to witness how disparate cultures persist, exchange and collide in the city’s contested streets   In an interview with Helen Mackreath, artist and activist Dor Guez discusses his refusal to accept the Israeli ‘formalisation of what identity is supposed to be, since none of us fit into the formal definition of a national identity’ He talks about the possibility of assuming different identities according to context, a practice formalised in his recent project The Sick Man of Europe, which addresses the relationship between individual perspective and artistic creativity   Identity is also the subject of a new essay by Anna Coatman, which takes Rachel Maclean’s Feed Me as the starting point for an exploration of the way that an emerging generation of video and performance artists are re-figuring the relationship of the individual to society through the use of alter egos, multiple personae and digital avatars   Duncan Wheeler takes up similar themes in his essay on Javier Cercas, one of Spain’s greatest living novelist, whose work interrogates the legacy of the Civil War and Franco in his home country   In the short story Wolves, Korean author Jeon Sungtae, translated by Sora Kim-Russell, merges different voices – the monk, the chief, the hunter and the acrobat – to tell the story of a great hunt and a dying tradition We’re excited, too, to publish a short story by Danish author Naja Marie Aidt, who recently read at the US launch of our fourteenth print issue at Signal Gallery, Brooklyn   In advance of the publication of our fifteenth print issue we publish recent translations form the 30-volume magnum opus of Ko Un, Korea’s foremost living poet We’re excited to publish more from Maninbo, and brand new work, in the upcoming print issue

online_issue

November 2015

November 2015

online_issue

November 2015

The capacity of art and culture to reach across entrenched social divides is nowhere more disputed than in Jerusalem,...

In this month’s online issue, the first to be published since the conclusion of our successful fundraising campaign (thank you!) we’re very pleased to bring you a typically diverse collection of fiction, essays, art and interviews, free for your reading pleasure   As the struggle for Kurdish independence plays out in the shadow of wider regional crises, Alex Christie-Miller reports on the history of a conflict that has come to symbolise the twenty-first century crises of statehood, democracy and cultural diversity   We’re delighted to publish an interview with acclaimed Mexican novelist Valeria Luiselli, the author of Story of My Teeth – the formula for which she has described as ‘Dickens MP3 ÷ Balzac JPEG’ – and the composer of a ballet libretto, among other things Here she talks about ghosts, literary readymades and her ignorance of health and balance   To accompany the next instalment of White Screen – the artist’s film and new writing initiative we’ve undertaken in collaboration with Film and Video Umbrella – we also publish an interview with French artist Marine Hugonnier, touching upon issue of conflict, cartography, surveillance and the way we engage with images today   Book fetishists will relish Tess Little’s true story tracing the mystery of hundreds of missing pages from the British Library’s rare books, the world’s greatest stolen library, and a bibliomaniacal Iranian academic Thirza Wakefield contributes a piece on the pioneering British film-maker Mark Cousins, and we’re excited to publish a new story emerging writer Julianne Pachico Robert Herbert McClean, who comes with high recommendation from poets including Sam Riviere and Jack Underwood, contributes two poems

online_issue

October 2015

October 2015

online_issue

October 2015

In this month’s online issue, the first to be published since the conclusion of our successful fundraising campaign (thank...

Our new online issue has – by accident rather than design – a strong focus on the themes of place and identity Patrick deWitt’s Undermajordomo Minor begins with a young man’s escape from the small town of his childhood A surreal, funny and surprisingly poignant tale of love and the transition to adulthood, the novel is deWitt’s first since The Sisters Brothers, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize His writing process he summarises as follows: ‘I know if I’m bored the reader will also be bored’   Described as an ‘artist of immense stature’ by László Krasznahorkai, Wolfgang Hilbig was among the great chroniclers of the postwar German experience Here we publish an excerpt from The Sleep of the Righteous on a subject to which he returned many times in his poetry and prose: the relationship of individual identity to place ‘How can one demand of a shadow that he describe the image of a shadow town?’ The half-German, half-American, part-Christian, part-Jewish writer Benjamin Markovits, meanwhile, considers what it means to be an immigrant in Britain and the freedom of non-belonging   Katrina Palmer, described by the Guardian’s Miranda Sawyer as ‘a sculptor who builds sculptures using words’, is at the vanguard of a new generation of British artists She was recently awarded the prestigious BBC/Artangel Open, and used the commission to document her stay on the remote Isle of Portland through a book, an audiowalk, and other literary constructions In our September issue she talks to Jamie Sutcliffe about the ‘relationship between writing and making’   In an essay touching on the possibility of art and language to express landscape, Gareth Evans travels to the English countryside to experience the ‘terrain transformed’ by the historic American artist of light and space, James Turrell We are pleased too, to present a selection of paintings by Allison Katz, accompanied by her conversation with curator Frances Loeffler on the subject of puns, the possibilities of painting, and El Chapo’s bid for freedom Finally we are excited to publish poems by Natalia Litvinova, translated by Daniela Camozzi  
September 2015

online_issue

September 2015


 

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