Sheila Heti’s sensationally successful novel How Should a Person Be? was dubbed ‘HBO’s Girls in book form’ by the Guardian, while a recent event hosted by The White Review was described by the same newspaper, perhaps in need of some new pop culture references, as conjuring ‘the feel of a books party in Lena Dunham’s Girls with that of a rock gig’s moshpit’ So a collaboration seems overdue We’re delighted to be publishing Sheila’s fabulous tale on the subject of love, neglect and Princess Catherine, ‘The Cherry Tree’ In the same month that the editors sit on a panel at the ICA to discuss the future of experimental writing, it seems apt that we are publishing an interview with Lars Iyer, who with his recent trilogy of books Spurious, Dogma and Exodus has established himself among this country’s most exciting new writers His treatise on contemporary literature, ‘Nude in Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss’, remains among the most widely read pieces in the history of this journal In a similar vein to that piece, John Douglas Millar asks, as we traipse through the endless revisits to modernism occasioned by the centenary of 1913, whether contemporary practice in art and literature is being suffocated by its obsession with the past Juan Goytisolo is arguably Spain’s greatest living writer, and among the fiercest critics of both that country’s cultural insularity and European literary conservatism in general We are honoured then, to carry ‘Jean Genet in Spain’, his personal account of the great French rebel’s time in Barcelona Elsewhere, we bring you ‘Neologism: How Words Do Things With Words’, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi’s lecture at Art Dubai on ‘the impulse to invent new words’; a new short story, ‘What We Did After We Lost 100 Years’ Wealth in 24 Months’, by Agri Ismail; and two poems by Melissa Lee-Houghton

This month’s online issue sees Scott Esposito, editor of the Quarterly Conversation, respond to Lars Iyer’s essay-manifesto, ‘Nude in Your Hot Tub’ In his essay, ‘Negation’, Esposito argues against the ‘death of literature’, finding hope in the works of Oulipian writer Jacques Roubaud and the prolific Argentine novelist Cesar Aira Elsewhere: artist Lawrence Lek, featured in The White Review No 1, interviews computational architect Michael Hansmeyer on the relationship between aesthetics and technology; Rye Dag Holmboe chairs a panel discussion with modernist poet John James, ex-Riverside Studios director David Gothard and curator Joe Melvin on performance art and documentation We’re also excited to be publishing our very first Russian writer, Maxim Osipov, whose short story ‘Moscow – Petrozavodsk’ is translated by Anne-Marie Jackson Finally, poet Cutter Streeby contributes two experimental poems, ‘Interview’ and ‘Letter from a New City to an Old Friend’