I was relieved to see her on my walk along the river front with the black heron and squatting geese Although relief is not what I thought I’d feel A sweet smell rose from the river it was not unpleasant, at least though some people might say so Flowers drooped from…
misery confirmed Fren Burt is sitting across from me drinking a milk and vodka on the rocks. Too poor to afford coffee liqueur, too politically correct to order a ‘white’ Russian. There’s a wasp in my beer. Sunlight refracts through the glass onto its squirming body. Nobody saves a drowning wasp, do they? They will…
I finished “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich” in a rapid two days, caught up in the Kazakhstan snowstorm that is this novel. A scarcity of language that matched the bare exposure of the gulag system, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s controversial work gave me a new light on how much can be said with very little.…
Six inches across, shaped like a banana. The cut runs from the woman’s neck, between her breasts, towards her navel. If I wanted I could peel the skin back and reveal her rib-cage. There’s no blood on her skin, no blood on the sand: she’s clean, clean all over, veins visible in her arms and…
My first book is finished and comes in at 84,000 words. I’m trying to print it out, but it’s a hassle. You can read the introduction to the book here. Whilst I’m waiting for the book to stew over, and build up enough patience to print 256 A4 pages, I’ve started another project. This is…
I’d rather not tell you my name, if that’s okay with you. This story isn’t about me. It’s about Espen Stengard, who was born in 1994 in a shitty little town in Kent, which is in the South East of England, not far from the throbbing heart of the old empire. This was the year…
When I was younger and grew up reading mostly fantasy (Magician by Raymond E. Feist is one of my all-time favourites) I didn’t pay attention to a lot. I just loved the magic, the dragons, the story. Looking back, when reading Magician for a fifth time, I noticed that the first line is objectively dull. The…
Roth’s “The Plot Against America” must’ve struck the average reader as pertinent when it was first published in 2004, given the growth of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflict, but nothing had prepared me for how shockingly the plot of this alternative-history novel reflects modern American society. Perhaps I am placing too much importance on my own…
This week has been both disgustingly shocking and happily reassuring. The media consistently spins out everything that goes wrong in Trump’s White House into a full-blown scandal. We’re going to have to put up with this for four years. This is what’s called “desensitization.” When will the media realise that this has been Trump’s grand…
I’ve run to the romantic city. The sinking city. Years before she’d asked me if we we could go, together, and now I’m here, alone. The waterways are green-blue and the yellow-fronted houses are crumbling. Henry James wrote of the empty palaces, I’m here to write of the emptiness of the whole adventure. On the…
Seal Matches 