‘I Will Always Love You’ by Frank O’Hara

while I sought your face / to be familiar in the blueness // or to follow your sharp whistle / around a corner into my light // that was love growing fainter / each time you failed to appear //

Francis Russell ‘Frank’ O’Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O’Hara became prominent in New York City’s art world. O’Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School, an informal group of artists, writers, and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting, and contemporary avant-garde art movements. Before he died at age 40, he had published six poetry collections, and his work and life has since been written about extensively.

‘Fire Season: Super Perennial’ by Jacqueline Lyons

In one dream, a rain shower in every room, matchbook rolled / into the hem of a yellow dress / fountain tumbling with smoke instead of water

Jacqueline Lyons is the author of poetry collections Adorable Airport (Barrow Street Press), The Way They Say Yes Here (Hanging Loose Press), and poetry chapbooks Earthquake Daily (New Michigan Press), and Lost Colony (Dancing Girl Press). Her nonfiction has been cited in Best American Essays, and her essay collection, Breakdown of Poses, was named finalist for an AWP Award Series Prize in Nonfiction. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at California Lutheran University. ‘Fire Season: Super Perennial’ won Palette Poetry’s 2025 Nature Poetry Prize.

‘Swimming in a Glacial Lake, Late Autumn’ by Catherine Pond

Rain leaves bite marks on my skin. In a past life I turned / every love object into an enemy. Now I hold my breath // and dive again, through the warm surface layer into the deep.

Catherine Pond is the author of one collection of poetry, Fieldglass (Southern Illinois University Press, 2021), winner of the Crab Orchard First Book Prize and a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her poems have recently appeared in Indiana Review, The Missouri Review, and AGNI, as well as in anthologies including Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry, Best New Poets, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She works as a freelance writer and lives in San Francisco.

‘Second Body’ by Catherine Pond

One hand / reaches up to hide your face. // Don’t be shy. You cleave /past from future, / false from true. // One day, you will become, / away from me. I will never be who I was // before you.

‘Reflection’ by Asmaa Azaizeh, translated from the Arabic by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Since then I’ve let my poems go. / Every night poets get drunk beneath my window / and dictate wise poems to me. / I loathe wisdom. / I invite them in, slaughter them like fattened sheep / and dine on them, / but I still can’t get my voice back. I glimpse it through the window, crucified / at the top of the mountain.

Asmaa Azaizeh is a poet, performer, and journalist based in Haifa. She was born in 1985 in the village of Daburieh, in the Lower Galilee, Palestine. In 2010, Asmaa received the Debutant Writer Award from Al Qattan Foundation, for her volume of poetry, Liwa, published in 2011 with Dar Al Ahliya, Jordan. In 2024, Asmaa published a memoir A Year of Small Museums. The author of four poetry collections, her poetry has been translated to English, German, Spanish, Farsi, Swedish, Italian, Greek, among others.

‘Homecoming’ by Landis Grenville

This home is always shifting, the water reaching up to take / what it will. There are days I cannot find myself // between the steps of my parents’ home and the long sigh / of afternoon rain.

Landis Grenville is a poet whose work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly, and The Southern Florida Poetry Journal, among other publications. She earned her PhD in poetry from Florida State University and her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia. A digital publishing librarian at Florida State University, Grenville lives in Tallahassee.

‘The Dusk’ by Robert Gray (1945 to 2025)

‘And the kangaroo settles down, pronged, / then lifts itself / carefully, like a package passed over from both arms’

Robert Gray published 13 collections of poetry, and his Selected Poems have been published in the UK and Europe as well as Australia. He won every major poetry prize in the country, and is taught widely in schools and universities. His poetry is characterised by the striking and often unexpected nature of his imagery, his flexible use of the free-verse line, and an attitude drawn from Buddhism, which is determined to capture the particular qualities and textures of the material world, the ‘thingness’ of things. Gray died in November 2025.

‘The Bluet’ by James Schuyler (1923-1991)

Unexpected / as a tear when someone / reads a poem you wrote / for him: ‘It’s this line / here.’ That bluet breaks / me up, tiny spring flower / late, late in dour October.

James Schuyler was a Pulitzer Prize winning poet central member of the New York School. The late 1960s and 1970s were the productive zenith of Schuyler’s career, culminating in the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Morning of the Poem awarded in 1980. During the 1980s, Schuyler became increasingly reclusive as he was beset with financial and health problems. Freely Espousing, Schuyler’s first major collection of poetry, was published in 1969 at the age of 46. His other major collections include The Crystal Lithium (1972), Hymn to Life (1974), The Morning of the Poem (1980), and A Few Days (1985). Schuyler received the Longview Foundation Award in 1961, the Frank O’Hara Prize for Poetry in 1969, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fellowship from the American Academy of Poets.

‘Grace’ by Cecilia Woloch

walking slowly through the dark / toward me – love, I think / the body is a miracle, that animal / whose graceful shadow / lies between us, calmed

Cecilia Woloch earned her BA at Transylvania University and an MFA at Antioch University, Los Angeles. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem (2018, 2002), Carpathia (2009), Late (2003), and Sacrifice (1997). Her poetry has been translated into several languages and included in numerous anthologies, such as An Introduction to the Prose Poem (2009), Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (2008), and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (2005).

‘Sisyphus’ by Shara Lessley

As if weightlessness were aspirational― / what nonsense― // your death, / a stone // I can only hope to shoulder forever.

Shara Lessley is the author of the poetry collections The Explosive Expert’s Wife (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) and Two-Headed Nightingale (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2012). She is, alongside Bruce Snider, coeditor of the essay collection The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press, 2018). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, Lessley’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Vermont Studio Centre, and Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts. She lives in Virginia where she is an editor and teacher.

‘Beach’ by Paul Farley

Seeking to get as far as possible / from being a core customer, from traditional big players and broad / narratives, a place outside arborescent hierarchies and the general / drift towards consumer-driven content, to spend a night imagining dives

Paul Farley was born in Liverpool and studied at the Chelsea School of Art. He has published six collections of poetry with Picador, including The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You, which won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection, and The Ice Age, which won the Whitbread Poetry Award. ‘Beach’ (whose narrator spends the night inside a beached whale) is from his poetry collection The Mizzy (2019), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Book Awards.

‘How To Speak Love in a Storm?’ by Stewart Henderson 

How to speak love in a storm? / is to put up a signpost for the lost, / as on the bitter hillside / you lie murmuring, / ‘Why is this happening now?’ / Exposure, like a fox, / circling your lamb’s heart.

Stewart Henderson is a Liverpool-born best-selling poet, song lyricist, and award-winning broadcaster. He has published over a dozen poetry collections, including A Poet’s Notebook: with new poems, obviously (2018), Urban Angel (2000), and Assembled in Britain (1986). Henderson has also authored three volumes of poetry for children, with poems from those books included on the UK National Education Curriculum. He hosted the program Questions, Questions on BBC Radio 4 for eight years.

‘Aubade on Piazza del Popolo with Saxophonist and Chopin’ by Ashna Ali

Gray and blue and purple wafting behind him / more ancient than any ruin, even as they slide / into light. He grew me into something else, this boy.

Ashna Ali is a queer and disabled Bangladeshi American poet. They earned their MFA from Randolph College where they were a Nancy Craig Blackburn ’71 Fellow. Ali is the author of The Relativity of Living Well (Bone Bouquet, 2024). The recipient of additional fellowships from Brooklyn Poets and In Surreal Life, they live in Brooklyn, New York, on unceded Lenapehoking land.

‘Audience’ by Derrick Austin

Fra Angelico knew what to withhold, scripture being a shared language, and painted details, not props. The door to hell kicked off its hinges, indelible, sure. But the nails. The bent nail.

Derrick Austin is the author of This Elegance (Boa Editions, 2026); Tenderness (Boa Editions, 2021), winner of the 2021 Isabella Gardener Award; Trouble the Water (Boa Editions, 2016). His other honours include the 2026 AICA-USA Art Critics Fellowship and the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship. He currently lives in Oakland, California.

‘The Amenities’ by Heather McHugh

in those days I romanticised / a risk (I thought I’d die / in the alcoholic automobile, die / at the hands of nerveless dentistry). Small hearts / were printed in the chequebook; when my parents called me / dear, they meant expensive.

Heather McHugh entered Harvard at the age of sixteen and later did graduate work at the University of Denver. Her first book of poems, Dangers, was published in 1977. Subsequent volumes include To the Quick, Hinge & Sign, The Father of the Predicaments, and Broken English: Poetry and Partiality, a collection of essays. Her translation work includes Euripides’ Cyclops and Glottal Stop: Poems of Paul Celan (with her husband, Nikolai Popov). McHugh has taught at many universities, including the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

‘Driving to Santa Fe’ by Paisley Rekdal

fragile. The treasure of him, like anything, / gone. Even now, I thumb that face / like a coin I cannot spend. If I ever lived, / I lived in him, fishing the cold / trout-thick streams, waking to snow, dying / when he died, which is a comfort.

Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction, and seven books of poetry, most recently, West: A Translation, which won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Reading the West Poetry Award, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah where she directs the American West Centre.

‘Missing’ by Mary Morris

On anniversaries of their departures / they blow kisses in wind from behind / mountains or sing in disguise through /gale or bird. Then silence. Waif thin.

Mary Morris is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Lanterns in the Night Market (2025 Texas Review Press). Her work has also been widely published in literary journals. She received the Rita Dove Award, the Western Humanities Review Prize in Poetry and the New Mexico Discovery Award. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

‘At the end of the world, you tell me about the bees’ by Muriel Leung

Loss made me, iron-hot, shaped me. / Without this ember grief, only burnished / light remains. Snowless.

Muriel Leung is a poet and author of the poetry collections Imagine Us, the Swarm (Nightboat Books, 2021), winner of the 2022 Poetry Society of America’s Four Quartets Prize, and Bone Confetti (Noemi Press, 2016), as well as the novel How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster (W. W. Norton & Company, 2024), winner of the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. Based in Los Angeles, she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing program at California Institute of the Arts.

‘Pulse’  by Cynan Jones

The title story of Cynan Jones’ recent collection is both compellingly immediate and quietly devastating. On the surface, ‘Pulse’ is the tale of a fierce storm that threatens to bring down a tree on power lines over a young family’s home. In and around this scene, Jones offers a vivid picture of a couple who have become distanced from each other while caring for a baby they hadn’t expected and living life on a property that’s sapping their energy. They’re as close to toppling as their nearby trees are after one tree is removed from the stand.

Jones has said: ‘Much rural fiction I’ve read by contemporary writers often feels quite fake, written from the point of view of a visitor, rather than a native’. Happily, I can confirm that this collection reveals Jones’ deep intimacy with and understanding of rural territory. Here’s a quote …

– Shall I lift her into the cot?

He could tell before she answered. He understood because he, too, felt that the little one had become, to each of them separately, their most safe point. That if they were within reach of her breath the rest of the world went away. Nothing more mattered, not even each other.

I miss you, he wanted to say. I miss you beyond any means I have of coping with the distance you have gone.

– I’ll go on the pullout. It’s fine, he said.

Cynan Jones is a Welsh author of five short novels – The Long Dry, Everything I Found on the Beach, Bird, Blood, Snow, The Dig, and Cove – and  Stillicide, a collection of twelve stories commissioned by BBC Radio 4 that aired over the summer 2019. He has been longlisted and shortlisted for numerous prizes and his work has been published in more than twenty countries, and short stories have appeared on BBC Radio 4 and in a number of anthologies and publications including Granta Magazine, Freeman’s, and The New Yorker. His latest collection, Pulse, was published by Granta Books in November 2025.

(And if you’re keen to read more of Jones’ work, I’ve previously featured his 2016 short story ‘The Edge of the Shoal’ here.)

‘An incautious hunger’ by Mark Spragg

This is a profound and beautiful story told from the perspective of an older male bear who is grappling with the threats around him as they grow more frequent. He is driven by instinct but also cognisant of how his mother was lured away by humans. He needs to feed himself or he will not survive and yet, in his quest for meat, he is becoming less careful. Some final injuries slow him down and we see his time is coming to an end – an inevitable fate to which he will knowingly and nobly surrender. Here are some quotes …

A dozen wolves patrol at the perimeter of his threat, just out of his reach, indignant and baleful. The bison was their kill. The adolescents voice their frustration in yips and snarls, the bolder adults advancing in useless sorties, the elders lounging in the timber, like him, practiced in their patience, their acceptance of the hierarchy of predation, of peril, of opportunity.

The colour of fresh blood striking and vital in the snow: crimson, garnet, burgundy, aging finally to rust, and always, under a new moon, drained of colour. Every creature’s blood, on a dark and overcast night, appears black as obsidian, as lustreless as coal.

Mark Spragg is the author of Where Rivers Change Direction, and the novels The Fruit of Stone, An Unfinished Life, and Bone Fire. All four were top-ten Book Sense selections. His work has been translated into eleven languages.

‘The History of Sound’ by Ben Shattuck

The title story in Shattuck’s collection had a profound effect on me. Even if you’ve seen the movie (starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor), you should still read the story as its prose is powerful and themes deeply evocative. As Shattuck says, his story asks: ‘What if we only get one chance at real love, and you spend the rest of your life wondering how you could have kept it?’ Lionel and David are students when they meet around a piano in a bar and go back to David’s room together. Soon after, David serves in the First World War, and the lovers lose touch for a while. Post-war they spend several weeks one summer walking and camping in the forests and on the coast of Maine collecting folk songs. Much later in life, Lionel is sent twenty-five wax phonograph cylinders, which hold their folk recordings. What he hears when he replays them brings the past rushing back, and with it a reckoning. Here’s a quote …

Not like the baroque music I began to love at the Conservatory, sharp and abstract and ornate like coldly glittering pieces of jewellery. The folk songs had soft underbellies, could put a lump in your throat just by the melody. Emotion in song; nothing fancy.

Ben Shattuck is the multi-award-winning author of Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau (Tin House, 2022) and The History of Sound: Stories, (Viking 2024) the title story of the latter released in 2025 as an internationally acclaimed film. He lives with his wife daughter on the coast of Massachusetts, where he owns and runs the oldest general store in America, built in 1793. He is also the founder and director of the Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency.

‘An Eye in the Throat’ by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell

Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin has been described as a modern master of uncanny fiction and ‘An Eye in the Throat’, from her collection Good and Evil and Other Stories, is certainly unsettling. A child swallows a battery under the supervision of his father. After a pit-stop on the long drive home from one of the many hospital visits the family must make to get the child treated for the damage the battery caused, the parents realise that he isn’t in the car with them. The child is found unharmed and he accompanies them home. In the months and years following, nightly mysterious calls prod at the father until decades of their repetition render them almost comforting. What is less comforting is the emotional distance that has opened between the father and his family. As the boy ponders his tracheotomy scar, he asks himself: ‘[I]f I stick a finger in the hole that is mine but that hurts in the body of another, if I probe it, if I prod it, what I touch in there – is that my father?’ Here’s a quote …

Night has fallen by the time we reach the service station, and there’s a line for the pumps. It’s a Friday in the busy season, and amid the noise of car doors opening and closing, people talking and shouting, my parents do what they can to keep me from waking. Very slowly, Mom moves out from under me, lays me down on the back seat, and covers me with my yellow blanket.

She leans forward and whispers, “You want some coffee?”

My father turns and looks at her. He gazes at the hair falling long and loose over her chest. After this trip she will always wear it short, and she’ll stop sharing a bed with him, sleeping instead on a mattress on the floor of my room. My father is so tired that he is slow to answer.

“Coffee it is, then,” whispers Mom.

Samanta Schweblin is the author of the novel Fever Dream, a finalist for the International Booker Prize, and the novel Little Eyes and story collection A Mouthful of Birds, longlisted for the same prize. Chosen by Granta as one of the twenty-two best writers in Spanish under the age of thirty-five, she has won numerous prestigious awards around the world. Her books have been translated into thirty-five languages, and her work has appeared in English in The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine. Originally from Buenos Aires, Schweblin now lives in Berlin.

Megan McDowell is the recipient of a 2020 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been short- or longlisted four times for the International Booker Prize. She lives in Santiago, Chile.

‘The Emerald Light in the Air’ by Donald Antrim

‘In less than a year, he’d lost his mother, his father, and, as he’d once and sometimes still felt Julia to be, the love of his life …’ – what a compelling opener to this disquieting story that shows just how much loss can change a person. Sometimes loss cracks people open so completely that daily life’s frustrations, ‘even the big ones’, no longer rule them. Billy French is heading to the dump with his ex-partner Julia’s artworks and a box of his old comics. He is also thinking about the dinner he has been preparing for the woman he lost his virginity to when they were youths. After stopping to move a fallen bough blocking the road, his car plunges down an embankment. His efforts to rescue the car and get back on track lead him to drive along a riverbed where the car gets stuck on a boulder. Two boys find him and take him to a cabin where their mother is dying, and their father is keeping vigil. The boys believe Billy is a doctor, but the father soon realises he is not. Yet, Billy does offer the woman several things that will help her, including a pill he administers, and after which he steps outside trembling. This is when we learn in detail about the electroconvulsive therapy he has endured after Julia left him to marry another man. The story seems simple, but it has a deep and disturbing current running through it. It is only later that I realised Antrim had electroconvulsive therapy to help him ‘find his way back from suicide’. Here’s a quote …

After Julia left, in his worsening he’d walked and moved as if crushed by some stronger form of gravity. The air had pressed him down, and he could not get out from under it. Some days, he’d curled in a ball on the floor and promised himself that soon, soon, soon – it would be his gift to himself – he’d walk up to the barn and lie down with the rifle.

The car was swamped. Or it wasn’t, exactly, but the creek had risen and the tires now made a wake. The Mercedes didn’t have much acceleration, and the steering felt loose. Billy powered over a high rock, or maybe a tree root – it was hard to see – then, suddenly, precipitately, the wheels dropped in front and the car slammed down and stopped.

Donald Antrim is the author of a memoir, The Afterlife, and three novels: Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, The Hundred Brothers, and The Verificationist. He is a contributor to The New Yorker and the recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2009. At MacDowell, Antrim has worked on his fourth novel, a book about the life of his mother (sections of which have appeared in The New Yorker), and in 2025 he worked on a novel tentatively titled Must I Read All of Wittgenstein?

‘Car Crash While Hitchhiking’ by Denis Johnson

This is the kind of story that rearranges your molecules. The feeling of the night, the crash and the people involved is so immediate, you sense you could walk up to one of them and touch their skin as the ambulances and cop cars nudge through the backed-up traffic … The aftermath is equally real and stark. Here’s a quote …

Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn’t know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That’s what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.

Denis Johnson (1949-2017) was the author of nine novels, one novella, two books of short stories, five collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage. Among other honours, his novel Tree of Smoke won the 2007 National Book Award, and Train Dreams was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.

‘Sightline’ by Rachael Riley

This is a beautifully rendered story of grief for the narrator’s recently deceased father. It is set in a cabin in the woods (one of my favourite places for stories to be set). Following their father’s funeral, the narrator holes up in the cabin he had maintained and develops an unexpected friendship with a neighbour. In touch with nature and confronted by reminders, the narrator is forced to acknowledge their complicated feelings for family and need to be comforted. Here’s a quote …

My father is dead. The thought comes while I examine the exposed white of the leg bones. My father has been not-dead my whole life and now he is the opposite. It feels wrong that such a change could come cleanly and quietly. There was no wound, no blood, no fight. No chewed-off leg.

I find isolation but no escape. My father is in the palimpsest of repairs, in the crooked coat hook. I hear him in the whir of the stubborn water pump that he cursed at like it was a misbehaving dog. When I sleep, I leave the curtains open. I do not want to think of curtains closing around his narrow hospital bed.

The first night the lake is solid, the moon is a half. It spills handfuls of light onto the once-water. The howls of coyotes rise up and I look out my window for the shadow of their movement against ice. I see nothing.

Rachael Riley (they/them) is a neurodivergent Pākehā (settler) writer from Aotearoa, New Zealand, currently living and working in Tiohti:áke, Montreal. Their poetry has appeared in Overcomm and LBRNTH, among others, and has been shortlisted for the Malahat New Horizons Award. Their fiction has received the Fence Reader’s Choice fellowship to the International Literary Seminars in Kenya and been longlisted for the Masters Review Anthology and the CBC Short Story Prize. They are currently completing their master’s degree at Concordia University.

‘Somewhere Warm’ by Bonnie Jo Campbell

This was my favourite story from Bonnie Jo Campbell’s collection Mothers, Tell Your Daughters and it’s a memorable tale of love, betrayal, and big-heartedness. The Boston Globe has said, ‘Campbell trains her unsparing eye on women and girls whose lives are marked by abuse, teenage pregnancies, and philandering men’ – and ‘Somewhere Warm’ certainly plumbs these depths. It also shows how women and girls need to draw on their strengths and connections to one another to survive and thrive. Here’s a quote …

The truck driver imagined the girl’s ma was suddenly behind him, but it was only the scent of Sherry’s perfume on the pillows …

‘Is that why you came in here like this?’ he finally asked. ‘So you could get away with skipping school?’

‘Partly. And I think you’re cute. And I can tell you’re thinking about breaking up with my ma.’

‘Well, we shouldn’t have done this. It’s wrong. It’s about the wrongest thing I’ve ever done.’ The truck driver’s gut-wrenching regret and determination to repent lasted much of the morning, but by early afternoon he concluded that once you’d done something as bad as what he’d done, there wasn’t really any going back. As the weeks passed, the truck driver found that he loved lying in bed with this foulmouthed, freckle-faced, cigarette-stealing school-skipper more than anything. She was funny in her belligerence and smart-aleckiness, so alive and surprising. At fifteen she was a year closer to him in age than Sherry was at thirty-six.

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of seven works of fiction, including The Waters, a national bestseller, and American Salvage, finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she lives outside Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her husband and donkeys.

‘George & Susan’ by Joy Williams

‘George & Susan’ is both quirky and clever; a glittering jewel in The Pelican Child: Stories, the latest collection from Joy Williams. The George of the title is George Gurdjieff’s ghost who is in love with Susan Sontag – ‘How he longs to stroke her skunk-striped hair.’ His obsession takes him to 2409 East Drachman, the bungalow in Tucson, Arizona, where Sontag grew up in the 1940s. He describes it as the inauspicious place where she struggled against death and anonymity ‘when she was just a child, when she wasn’t even old enough to keep track of her socks. Here she worked worked worked, creating a self, as though from wax, a candle.’ The literary and philosophical musings in the story are many, so I was not surprised to learn later that George Gurdjieff was a philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, composer and movement teacher who died in 1949. Katherine Mansfield famously spent the final three months of her life living under his care at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Here’s a quote …

G is shocked at how his mind is sleepily toying with him. Susan, he thinks, sternly, Susan. I pledge … Fealty is a word that keeps bumping around him like a fly. Fealty. He has always been attracted to the follies of writers. Their pursuit is so unnatural, it is so willed. There was that one that came to him, the tubercular, the one they made all the fuss about, that Katherine person. But she lacked the moxie. Susan would have snapped her like a carrot.

Joy Williams is the author of four previous novels – including The Quick and the Dead, a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize–and four collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among her many honours are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the Academy in 2008. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Laramie, Wyoming.

‘A Dark and Winding Road’ by Ottessa Moshfegh

Charles retreats to a cabin to spite his pregnant wife and in the hope that she will come to appreciate him in his absence. He also wants to have one last weekend before the baby is born and his life, as it was before, is ruined. He smokes a few joints and starts to imagine his unborn son’s woe and resentment toward him and ‘everything bad he’d say about me to his own children after my death’. It’s during these musings that a girl named Michelle appears looking for his younger brother MJ. We learn how MJ was a loyal brother who dared Charles to do stupid things but Charles was a coward. ‘He could do whatever he wanted to me,’ Charles acknowledges, but Charles always knew he’d get back at MJ when the time was right. Read the story to find out how. Here’s a quote …

But the spirit of the place made me think of simpler times, olden days, yore, or whenever it was that people rarely spoke except to say there was a storm coming or the berries were poisonous or whatnot, the bare essentials. It was deadly quiet up there. You could hear your own heart beating if you listened.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from New England. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Death in Her Hands, and Lapvona, her next three novels, were New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World and a novella, McGlue. She lives in Southern California.

‘Property’ by Elizabeth McCracken

‘Property’ is one of nine short stories in McCracken’s 2014 collection Thunderstruck and Other Stories and it was selected by Geraldine Brooks for The Best American Short Stories 2011. It features a young scholar who is grieving the sudden death of his wife and who feels compelled to refurbish the Maine rental house they were to share together because its furniture and knickknacks make the house feel more like a museum than a home to rent. His actions include removing his landlord’s possessions – a decision he later questions when he gains more insight into her personal history of loss and loneliness. Here’s a quote …

This was a house abandoned by sadness, not a war or epidemic but the end of a marriage, and kept in place to commemorate both the marriage and its ruin.

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, The Giant’s House, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, and Niagara Falls All Over Again. A former public librarian, she is now a faculty member at the University of Texas, Austin, and has received grants and awards from numerous organisations, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Academy in Berlin. Elizabeth is married to the novelist and illustrator Edward Carey.

 ‘Amalur’ by Liadan Ní Chuinn

The stories in Liadan Ní­ Chuinn’s debut collection Every One Still Here skilfully blend the personal and the political with several set in the north of Ireland where Ní­ Chuinn was born in 1998. In ‘Amalur’, the protagonist’s boyfriend’s family are Basque people and the boyfriend’s father, Aitor, talks about how the government removed the language and they were fined for speaking it. Her boyfriend is a good man insofar as he is not abusive but he also stays silent about his brother-in-law’s abusive behaviour and retreats from other difficult subjects. Ultimately, the protagonist realises she and her boyfriend don’t ‘work [as a couple] without his family, that was the truth’. The fissures in her relationship with her mother have also deepened and become increasingly painful. Here’s a quote …

Yes, it was grieving. I grieved who I might have been. I missed my mother.

Since I was a teenager, she’d broken in my shoes for me.

She insisted. I had seen her feet bleed. She wore the shoes just until they softened, and would never hurt me.

Liadan Ní Chuinn was born in the north of Ireland in 1998. Every One Still Here is their first book.

‘The Lack of Noise’ by L.J. Bowden

Guest Judge of the 2025 Masters Review Winter Short Story Award, Bret Anthony Johnston, said ‘The Lack of Noise’ (which won L.J. Bowden 3rd prize in the competition) is brutal and beautiful fiction, harrowing in ways that are at once original and universal. And I agree. Set in rural Australia, Vic learns firsthand about nature’s violence and the harshness of human relationships when his mother takes in her lover Anthony and Vic’s farmer Dad decamps to the shearer’s quarters. The rivalry between the men is fierce and, although it’s short lived, Vic is relieved by a reprieve during the calving season, when his mother, father and Anthony all have to deal with dystocia (when the calf gets tangled inside the cow) – ‘all of them up to their shoulders in organs, grabbing and shifting the calves’. Later, when the farm must be sold, necessitating a move to a housing complex, things change again, and Vic must manage his emotions around urban life and the silence he finds there. Here’s a quote …

He showed me how brittle skin and meat are, how soft they can get. It wastes away easily, especially in open country. Dad said that a fox will often eat the arse first, or if it were a lamb, the muzzle first, sometimes leaving it alive.

L.J. Bowden is a writer from South Australia, Kaurna Country. His fiction has appeared in West Trade Review, Going Down Swinging, and Swine. Bowden was a finalist for The Best Australian Yarn and the Phyllis Grant Zellmer Prize for Fiction and The Master’s Review Winter Short Story Award. He is currently undertaking an MFA in creative writing at Boston University.

‘The Husband Stitch’ by Carmen Maria Machado

‘The Husband Stitch’ is from Carmen Maria Machado widely lauded short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. Its title refers to the extra stitch sometimes given to a woman childbirth. The purpose of the stitch is to make the vagina tighter than it was before childbirth, to maximise the husband’s pleasure during sex. Machado’s narrator tells a rollicking story of love, marriage, bearing a son and being betrayed by the husband she loves. Interwoven through her story, Machado offers us horror stories and commentary that acts like stage directions, to reinforce what’s going on. Ultimately, the story is a powerful exposé of patriarchy and how even the good men (like our narrator’s husband) let women down by trampling their truths and silencing their voices. When writer and teacher Jane Dykema is studying ‘The Husband Stitch’ with her students, she asks them: ‘Do you feel it, too? Or can you imagine it? The perils of living in a world made by a different gender? The justified and unjustified mistrust? The near-constant experience of being disbelieved, of learning to question your own sanity?’ Here’s a quote …

‘I am captivated by her, there is no other way to put it. There is something easy about her, but not easy the way I was – the way I am. She’s like dough, how the give of it beneath kneading hands disguises its sturdiness, its potential.’

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of ‘The New Vanguard,’ one of ‘15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.’

‘Among the Ruins’ by Brian Friel

I thoroughly agree with Louise Kennedy who says in her introduction to Colin Friel’s Stories of Ireland that this collection is magical and its prose is glorious. Consequently, I found it extremely hard to decide which story to feature here. My list of strong contenders made me wonder what sort of spell Friel had cast on me given I never thought I’d appreciate the subject matter of a story I dubbed ‘the cockfighting one’ (‘Ginger Hero’) or another I nicknamed ‘the pigeon flying one ’(‘The Widowhood System’) or that a story about a once grandiose family who wants to listen to a tape of their missionary nun daughter (‘The Foundry House’) would so thoroughly move me. In the end, I chose ‘Among the Ruins’, for its simple but profound journey of promise and heartache, and its pitch perfect voice. Joe is convinced by his wife Margo to take his young family to the home of his childhood because she thinks he should be curious about it. She also wants their two children to see the place where Joe had grown up. He knows before he goes that the place is in ruins – but on site he has some vivid (and not always pleasant) recollections of his childhood and watches as his family express their bafflement and disinterest in the place which has meant so much to him. Ultimately, Joe’s return to home has robbed him of his precious illusions of his past and ‘in their place now there was nothing – nothing at all but the truth’. Here’s a quote …

‘On the way home a sense of aloneness crept over him. Once he gave in to the temptation to glance in the mirror but was already dark outside, and Errigal was just part of the blackness behind them. He should never have gone back with Margo and the children. Because the past was a mirage – a soft illusion into which one steps in order to escape the present. Like hiding in the bower. How could he have told Margo that the bower had been their retreat, Susan’s and his, their laughing house?’

Brian Friel was a dramatist and writer often referred to as the ‘Irish Chekhov’ for his plays exploring social and political life in both the Republic of of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Friel began his writing career as a writer of short fiction, publishing his first short story in an Irish literary magazine before having work published in The New Yorker. By 1960, he was able to leave his teaching post to work full time as a writer. In 2006, Friel was elected to the position of Saoi of the Aosdána, the highest honour bestowed by the Irish association of artists, and in 2009 Queen’s University, Belfast, inaugurated the Brian Friel Theatre and Centre for Theatre Research. Friel died on October 2, 2015.

‘Winner’ by Ling Ma

‘Winner’ is a fabulous story about a Powerball winner who finds it hard to know what to do with her time now she doesn’t have to work. It’s also a critique of the American tendency to strive for wealth and how having wealth is rewarded by the accumulation of more wealth. The protagonist had an abusive supervisor at her final workplace, and they made life hell for her there. Winning such a lot of money gave her the chance to escape. But how do you best use your time if you don’t have or need a job? What is worth striving for? ‘Winner’ is also a story about gentrification and moving out of your old class and monetary constraints. At the beginning of his life, the couple’s child had spent a long time in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. How to instil morals into a child who has so much now, is also a live question. The child’s father says, ‘We need to teach him that, you know, you don’t just get rewarded for nothing. That’s chaos.’ Here’s a quote …

‘When you come into a big windfall, the impulse is to convert the money into material things. But I think the real trick is to convert money into time.’

Ling Ma is a writer from Fujian, Utah and Kansas. She is the author of the novel Severance, which received the Kirkus Prize, the Whiting Award and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. Ling Ma’s most recent book is Bliss Montage: Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), which was named a National Indie Bestseller, a New Yorker Best Book of the Year, and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Severance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018). She received her MFA from Cornell University. Prior to graduate school she worked as a journalist and editor. She lives in Chicago with her family and has taught creative writing and English at Cornell University and the University of Chicago.

‘Flight’ by Ishle Yi Park

Yi Park’s story ‘Flight’, which is told from a daughter’s point of view, handles the matter of domestic abuse with nuance and sensitivity. Hanah is a teenager with Korean immigrant parents who live in the US. While Apa (her father) doesn’t hit Hanah or her younger brother Seung, he beats their mother (Uma) and the violence often results in severe bruising. Apa’s hissing, cursing and coercive control over Uma also leaves the household on tenterhooks. When Uma escapes with the children, they eventually end up in Florida where they stay with my Uma’s friend from Korea, Okja Emo. After their first meal with Okja’s family Hanah observes, ‘We never had a meal this laid-back. Ever.’ At another point during their stay with Okja, she notes, ‘So this was the shape of our new life – slow and easy as a loose cotton dress.’ The story shows why a woman like Uma would leave a man like Apa and, also, explores why she might go back to him. Koreans have a strong family ethos, and immigrant Koreans want the best for their children. Under the weight of these pressures, sublimating one’s own feelings and desire to escape can seem like the lesser of two evils. Here’s a quote …

‘Dinners were torture. After a day of arguing with Italian customers, Apa insulted my mother’s kimchee and slammed the table whenever we spoke English. This is a free country, Uma, I once whined while she chopped scallions. Why do we have to eat together? My mother put down the knife with a soft clatter against the plastic chopping board. Outside is free country, she said, but inside is Apa country.’

Ishle Yi Park is the former poet laureate of Queens, New York, and the author of The Temperature of This Water (2004), which won three literary awards, including the PEN America Open Book Award for Outstanding Writers of Color. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, Manoa, The Beacon Best, Best American Poetry, and Century of the Tiger: 100 Years of Korean Culture in America. Park has performed her poetry and songs at over 300 venues in the United States, Cuba, Aotearoa, Singapore, Korea, Jamaica, and South Africa. She lives in Hawaii.

‘La Huesera’ by Dahlia de la Cerda

‘La Huesera’ is from Dahlia de la Cerda’s debut collection Reservoir Bitches (translated by Julia Sanches, Heather Cleary), which won an English PEN Award and was Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025. It is a power-packed eight-part story in which a young woman is writing a letter to herself, attempting to deal with her grief and to direct her anger over the brutal death of one of her girlfriends. In the process, we learn some startling realities about femicide in Mexico and how Mexican women survive, hit back, get assaulted or killed, in a world rife with danger. The narrator says ten women in Mexico are murdered every day, which is one every three hours. ‘What were we doing while other women were being raped, beaten to death and dismembered?’ / ‘An unidentified woman. You were one more body in this genocide.’ She also says, ‘Mexico is a monster that devours women.’ / ‘Cities covered with pink crosses. Cities covered with posters of missing women. Deserts of bone.’

La Huesera, we learn, is an old woman who collects the bones of wolves, lights a fire and sings the bones back into being. As the wolf runs off down the street, it transforms into a woman who is laughing and free. Read the story (and the collection) to see why de la Cerda is being hailed as a new and invigorating force in Mexican literature. Here are some quotes …

‘There is no room of one’s own when men think our bodies belong to them.’

‘What I didn’t keep was the promise I made to you: that I wouldn’t let myself drown in my sadness if something happened to you. But too late, I already did. I’m in it so deep that sometimes I even think I am sadness. You’ll be happy to know I got a tattoo on my arm in your honour and mine: sadness is rebellion.’

‘Bunker’ by Josephine Rowe

‘Bunker’ was a short story in its own right before it was revised and incorporated into Josephine Rowe’s latest book Little World: A Novel, which reads like four interconnected stories reminiscent of the structure of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge. It is a wise and winsome story about a feisty woman called Tilde who winds up in the kind of Aussie backwater that attracts all sorts of end times characters. Her van is on its last legs when she arrives in the ’70s, and she buries the horse float the van has been lugging along in the ground to use as a bunker when the apocalypse comes. Earlier in her travels, she has rescued the statue of a saint from an outback humpy and her care for the dead girl may have hallowed some of her endeavours. Tilde has lived in a train carriage in a clearing amid a grove of trees she planted from a handful of seed scattered decades ago. Now she’s unwell (was found reciting something by a bowser) and in St Elizabeth’s where ‘no-one but family can get at her, and she has no family that we know of’. Her neighbour Syb is keeping an eye on the place in her absence. There’s some intricate and poetic writing that pulls the reader into this strange and striking world and entices us to empathise with its inhabitants, especially Tilde. Here’s a quote …

‘You might go out at 3am to stalk off a bad dream or an argument or just to shake some dark spell, and a light would be burning through the trees, the carriage glowing like an oversized Christmas ornament, and no chance she’d be wasting the genny just for a night-light. All the blinds would be up and she’d either be straight-backed at the kitchen table or upright and in motion, a shadow flowing back and forth across the lit row of windows, poring over one of those magazines, her mind drip-fed by subscription.’

Josephine Rowe is the author of three story collections and two novels, including A Loving, Faithful Animal, longlisted for the 2017 Miles Franklin Award and selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She has twice been named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist, and Here Until August was shortlisted for the 2020 Stella Prize. She currently lives in coastal Victoria.

‘Only Goodness’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

‘Only Goodness’ is from Jhumpa Lahiri’s marvellous collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, which received the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award (the world’s largest prize for a short story collection) and was a finalist for the Story Prize. Sudha and her brother Rahul have a shaky bond that is fractured when he comes to visit her and her family in London. He claims he has changed since Sudha had introduced him to alcohol when he was in junior high and went to visit her at Penn and he’d taken to it instantly and assiduously. In London, he tells Suddha that his new addiction is to run every day. He also reminds her that he is now a parent to his girlfriend’s daughter. In the background, always looming, are their problematic parents, easy to upset or be upset by. As Sudha says of her father: ‘He never let his children forget that there had been no one to help him as he helped them, so that no matter how well Sudha did, she felt that her good fortune had been handed to her, not earned.’ Here’s a quote …

‘And yet she could not forgive herself. Even as an adult, she wished only that she could go back and change things: the ungainly things she’d worn, the insecurity she’d felt, all the innocent mistakes she’d made.’

Jhumpa Lahiri is a bilingual writer and translator, is the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Interpreter of Maladies and is also the author of The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland. Since 2015, Lahiri has been writing fiction, essays, and poetry in Italian: In Altre Parole (In Other Words), Il Vestito dei libri (The Clothing of Books), Dove mi trovo (self-translated as Whereabouts), Il quaderno di Nerina, and Racconti romani. She received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2014, and in 2019 was named Commendatore of the Italian Republic by President Sergio Mattarella. Her most recent book in English, Translating Myself and Others, was a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

‘The Particles of Order’ by Yiyun Li

This resonant story features a conversation between two women: Lilian Pang, an author from New Jersey, and Ursula Burnett, who had been the typist for the famous (now deceased) author Edmund Thornton. Guests come to stay at Thornton’s house, which Ursula manages, thinking they will find traces of the author in the house. Lilian’s different. She wants solitude, to read Euclid, and a change of scene to help her grieve the suicide of her two sons. Li has lost two children to suicide and has since written three short stories published in The New Yorker that feature Lilian: ‘I gave Lilian my life,’ she says, ‘but Lilian is not me’. While Edmund’s death has been very public, Ursula’s grief over losing him has remained a quiet affair. In contrast, Lilian has been hounded by strangers who write to her about their own misery. Also ‘journalists create a dramatic woman writer who suffered tragic losses as clickbait’. Ursula and Lilian’s conversation affirms their understanding that being allowed to sit with their grief will help them find a way through it. Here’s a quote …

‘Comforting? Ursula thought of the years she’d spent as Edmund’s typist – nearly half her life. All that time, however, could easily be condensed into a single image in a William Trevor story, no more than two or three sentences. A woman walks alone by the sea. A man, whom she has not stopped loving, lives without returning her love and then dies without thinking of her. “I suppose very few people in William Trevor’s work get themselves murdered, if that’s what you mean by “comforting”.’

‘A Thousand Years of Good Prayers’ by Yiyun Li

Yiyun Li’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers is a widely acclaimed collection of short stories published in 2005. The title story is my favourite, and features Mr Shi, a retired scientist from Beijing, who visits his divorced daughter, Yilan, in the US. Mr Shi is devastated to learn of his daughter’s divorce and is keen to try to get her to act more like a woman who will attract another man to marry her. When she reveals that the breakup was of her own making, he is shocked. Their conversations are mostly stilted – due to their cultural and generational differences – but Mr Shin’s daughter has learned to speak up for herself by learning English and she reveals some home truths which mean her father must admit to his own cover ups. He divulges everything to an Iranian woman he meets in the park whom he considers to be a friend, and we can’t help but feel for him. Mr Shin shares a Chinese proverb with her that claims it takes 300 years to forge a truly understanding relationship, and he adds that for a father and daughter this sympathy could take as long as 1,000 years to develop. Here’s a quote …

‘But isn’t it what you meant? We didn’t do a good job bringing you up in Chinese so you decided to find a new language and a new lover when you couldn’t talk to your husband honestly about your marriage.’

Yiyun Li is the author of six works of fiction – Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl – and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award, a PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize, and was featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 fiction issue. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

‘Shifting Occupancies’ by Corinna Vallianatos

In this breathtakingly good story from Vallianatos’s collection Origin Stories, Laurel and Seth are on separate solitary writing retreats – a trip they take each year. Laurel is at a hotel with a pool and spa, and Seth is at a house he’s rented in Joshua Tree. Neither of them is warm enough. They’ve been married for eight years, and there is a restlessness bubbling away, but they find it difficult to express exactly what it is they’re searching for. As author Jessica Anthony says, ‘we learn the solitude is meant to operate like imaginative fuel’ for the couple. Both are distracted by other people, and we’re prompted to ponder whether this will kickstart their creativity and keep their marriage humming along on steady (if somewhat disparate) tracks or have the opposite effect. Here’s a quote …

‘She cast off her shirt and hoisted her breasts out of her bra. Her nipples were like the soft eyes of a drunk.’

Corinna Vallianatos is Associate Professor of Practice in Creative Writing and the faculty advisor for Meridian at the University of Virginia. She is the author of the novel The Beforeland, and two collections of stories, My Escapee, winner of the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and Origin Stories, described by the New York Times as ‘shrewd meditations on ambition, shame, artistic boundaries and more’. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, BOMB, McSweeney’s, A Public Space, LitMag, and elsewhere, and she’s a MacDowell and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellow. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia, her MFA from the University of Arizona, and has taught in the University of Tampa’s low-residency MFA program and at Claremont McKenna College.

‘Walking Ghosts’ by Mary O’Donnell

In ‘Walking Ghosts’ the loss of Jane’s mother leads her into a land transaction to sell the family farm. The sale will undoubtedly benefit her financially, but it will also make it harder for a poor farmer who has eked out his living subletting the land. Jane realises she is being ruthless and perhaps not acting as her farmer father would have acted in the circumstances. Will she be ruled by compassion? Shame? Or the need to move on and fully commit to her urban life as an architect in another town? It’s a shifting world of possibilities and we wonder, once she has made her decision, who she will become. Here’s a quote …

‘One Friday, they met in the café of a general hardware store. It was full of timber-faced women leaning in closely together, some of them masked, others not.’

Mary O’Donnell is an acclaimed Irish poet and fiction writer, recognised for her role in expanding Ireland’s literary landscape. She has published eight poetry collections, including Unlegendary Heroes and Massacre of the Birds, as well as several novels. O’Donnell’s work has been translated into multiple languages. She has co-edited an anthology of Galician women’s poetry and won the Fish International Short Story Prize. O’Donnell’s literary achievements include winning the An Post/Irish Book Award in 2023 for her poem ‘Vectors in Kabul. O’Donnell has held writing residencies internationally and taught creative writing at university level. A member of Aosdána since 2001, she is an influential figure in Irish literature and has served on various literary adjudication panel

‘A Perfect Pair’ by Julia Strayer

‘A Perfect Pair’ is a beautifully conceived piece of microfiction that depicts the scratchiness of married life. The husband is super enthusiastic about starting a business that pairs a laundromat with a bowling alley. The wife can see all the pitfalls – like ‘drunk men, their heads inside dryer drums practicing Tarzan screams with some woman’s clean underwear taking the brunt of it.’ Here’s a quote …

‘I spit toothpaste into the sink and stare daggers at him in the mirror. “People who like laundromats aren’t the kind of people willing to wear shoes other people’s feet have sweated in.”

“Not everyone is like you. Some people are fun.”’

Julia Strayer has stories in Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review Online, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Jellyfish Review, Wigleaf, Atticus Review, and others, including The Wigleaf Top 50 and The Best Small Fictions. ‘A Perfect Pair’ was published by Fractured lit in June 2025. She teaches creative writing at New York University.

Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst – Actor Dave Win recreates episodes from his life as a gay, mixed-race person. Dave’s tenderest portrait is of his mother Avril, a seamstress, who brought him up alone in an English market town. This novel glows!

Time of the Child by Niall Williams – An abandoned baby is taken to the doctor’s surgery in Faha where it is showered with his daughter’s love. The doctor meddles, then recognises his hubris, but will the baby be exiled? Extraordinary writing.

Cairn by Kathleen Jamie – Jamie writes beautifully about landscape, ecology and ethics. She doesn’t preach but she does show her leanings. A slim volume of gems: ‘But a quartz pebble. Volcano spit. Stuff of the earth. A stone like a blind seer’s eye.’

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller – In December 1962, cottages in the West Country hold local doctor Eric Parry and his pregnant wife and Rita Simmons and her dairy farmer husband. Even before the blizzard hits, they’re faltering. Brilliant.

Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks – Three years after the sudden death of her husband, Brooks booked a flight to remote Flinders Island off the coast of Tasmania to give herself time to mourn. She also wrote this heartrending and beautiful memoir.

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo – ‘Twelve very different people, mostly black and female, more than a hundred years of change, and one sweeping, vibrant, glorious portrait of contemporary Britain.’ Big, bold and breathtaking.

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy – Dominic and his three children are living on a remote island, when a woman washes ashore. As storms gather, will they shut each other out or work together to protect the world’s last seed bank? Dazzling.

Snow Road Station by Elizabeth Hay – Lulu escapes to Snow Road Station in rural Ontario having blanked her lines on stage in a Beckett play. In her 60s, and making maple syrup with and near her friend Nan, she wonders if she’s a has-been? Perfect.

Flashlight by Susan Choi – The night Louisa’s father disappeared he was holding a flashlight. North Korean history filters through the tales of Louisa, her father and mother, as do the lies and silences that shape families and prop up empires. Great.

Nesting by Roisin O’Donnell – If you want to know how hard it is for a young mother to take her two children and leave her coercively controlling husband, this is the novel. Ireland’s draconian laws and housing crisis add difficulty. Unforgettable.

Looking Back: A Book of Memories by Lois Lowry – Lowry is perspicacious, funny, gentle and compassionate. I quote: ‘There would be no more wars if everyone just got into a giant bathtub together and played with the soap.’ A wonderful autobiography.

Also great: Dark Mode by Ashley Kalagian Blunt, Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton, Obit by Victoria Chang, Unsettled by Kate Grenville, Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda, Chameleon by Robert Dessaix, The Slip: Stories by Miriam Webster, Walking Ghosts by Mary O’Donnell, Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton, Place of Tides by James Redbank, Service by Sarah Gilmartin, Nightingale by Laura Elvery.

Second tier favourites: Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides by Adam Nicolson, The Registrar by Neela Janakiramanan, The Art Thief by Michael Finkel, Are You Somebody? by Nuala O’Faolain, Luster by Raven Leilani, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, Consolation of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson, Seasons on Harris by David Yeadon, Aliss at the Fire by Jon Fosse, Death in Black and White by SG Bryant, Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld, The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride, Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser, The Last Summer in Ireland by Noelle Harrison.

Even if you do know about these record-taking fast and slow animals, there are 57 more you can find out about in Sami Bayly’s new book The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Fast and Slow Animals.

Iconic animals known for speed, like the black marlin, cheetah and hare are included, as are well-known slow movers like the garden snail and the sloth. But Bayly also features animals that aren’t just the fastest and slowest walkers, runners and fliers – for instance the slow-ageing Greenland shark (also known as the sleeper shark), the high-speed spitting banded archerfish (its special eyes help aim its spit at prey) and the fast-clawed pistol shrimp (whose claws snap shut at 100 kilometres an hour).

As Bayly says in the encyclopaedia’s introduction, size to speed ratio is also important. Certain mites, for example, are among the fastest creatures on earth due to their ability to move a certain amount of body lengths over time in relation to their size. If a human ran 322 body lengths per second like a Californian mite does, she notes, they would cover 2317 kilometres per hour!

Two of my fast-favourite creatures Bayly includes are the Moroccan flic-flac spider (which performs gymnastic leaps down dunes at 2 metres per second to escape predators) and the peregrine falcon (the fastest animal on the planet, which can swoop at 83 metres per second).

Two of my slow-burn beauties are the Pacific banana slug (very slow and coloured like a banana) and the Olm (one Olm observed was so slow moving it didn’t move at all in seven years).

For each of the 60 creatures included there is a double page spread, one page for the illustration and scientific name and the other page for information about the animal’s fast or slow feats, conservation status, location/habitat and diet. There is also a box containing fun facts.

One intriguing illustration is of the ox heart ascidian, also known as the gold-mouth or ink-spot sea squirt, whose squishiness is well-rendered by Bayly in vivid purple and orange. I also liked her haunting depiction of the great barracuda, whose big eyes and teeth are accentuated through forced perspective and a brooding sea layered from indigo to tropical turquoise.

The Australian lungfish and the Australian tiger beetle were two Aussie animals I was happy to learn more about. The lungfish has been around for 380 million years, and the tiger beetle is the fastest-running insect on the planet; speed needed to propel it across the burning sands of our dry salt lakes and arid deserts.

I know an 8- and a 10-year-old boy who will love to receive this encyclopaedia for Christmas and I’m pretty sure their parents will find it fascinating too. I’ll get a gold star for choosing a beautiful and educational gift that will engross both fast and slow humans for hours.

The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Fast and Slow Animals

Sami Bayly
Hachette HB $32.99
Imprint: Lothian Children’s Books

‘Separation’ by Marie Howe

Driving out of town, I see him crossing / the Brooks Pharmacy parking lot, and remember/ how he would drop to his knees in the kitchen / and press his face to my dress, his cheek flat against // my belly as if he were listening for something. /

Marie Howe was born in 1950 in Rochester, New York. She is the author of New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2024), winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Magdalene (W. W. Norton, 2017), which was long-listed for the National Book Award; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W. W. Norton, 2009), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; What the Living Do (W. W. Norton, 1998); and The Good Thief (Persea Books, 1988), which was selected by Margaret Atwood for the 1987 National Poetry Series. What the Living Do is in many ways an elegy for Howe’s brother, John, who died of AIDS in 1989. ‘Separation’ is from New and Selected Poems.

‘For the Cult-themed Party’ by Jacques J Rancourt

persisting. We couldn’t pretend / to be asleep much longer. Even in Nijinsky’s ballet, // before its graphic depiction of desire, / a faun first wakes centre stage on a set

Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of Brocken Spectre (Alice James Books, 2021) and Novena (Pleiades Press, 2017). Set in San Francisco, Brocken Spectre examines the way the past presses up against the present. The speaker, raised in the wake of the AIDS crisis, engages with ideas of belatedness, of looking back to a past that cannot be inhabited, of the ethics of memory, and of the dangers in memorialising and romanticising tragedy.

‘Haul.’ by Izzy Roberts-Orr

I have been trying to mine you, / but you are not a quarry. // You tell me there is nothing in you / but coal / seams beneath the surface / that might burn for millions of years / if lit.

Izzy Roberts-Orr is a poet, writer and arts worker based on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country in regional Victoria. Her debut poetry collection, Raw Salt (Vagabond Press, 2024) won the 2024 Anne Elder Award for a debut collection. It was also the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship, Bundanon Artist Residency and Shortlisted for the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She is a recipient of the Marten Bequest Scholarship for Poetry, Varuna Pitch Me! Fellowship and the BR Whiting Residency (Rome) and works as Creative Producer for Red Room Poetry.

‘The Art of Unselfing’ by Safiya Sinclair

Your starved homesickness. The paper wasp kingdom / you set fire to, watched for days until it burnt a city in you. / Until a family your hands could not save // became the hurricane. How love is still unrooting you.

Safiya Sinclair is author of the memoir How to Say Babylon, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is also the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Cannibal was selected as one of the American Library Association’s Notable Books of the Year (2017). She is a Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

‘Headlamps’ by Marjorie Lotfi

She lets the red lamps of hindsight / burn out on a road she’s already / forgotten. The car is a womb and she / is unborn. Where are you from? / people ask. She refuses to say.

Marjorie Lofti was born in New Orleans, spent her childhood in Tehran, and lived in New York before moving to the UK in 1999. She is the author of The Wrong Person to Ask (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), which won the 2024 Felix Dennis Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Marjorie was one of the winners of the inaugural James Berry Prize and a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. She is one of the UNESCO Cities of Literature’s ILX 10 ‘Rising Stars of UK Writing’, a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and a member of Writer’s Mosaic. ‘Headlamps’ is from Women on the Road, edited by Iain Morrison (Fruitmarket) – and you should listen to this one. Marjorie’s rendition is beautiful.

‘Picture of Girl and Small Boy (Burji, Gaza, 2014)’ by Marjorie Lotfi

for light. Her hair, scraped back into a ponytail, / is open to sky; remnants of buildings filter down / one concrete chunk at a time, and the midday bells / of rockets ring out above her. She carries a boy

‘Dirge without Music’ by Edna St. Vincent Millay

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. Her passionate lyrics and superbly crafted sonnets have thrilled generations of readers long after the notoriously bohemian lifestyle she led in Greenwich Village in the 1920s ceased to shock them. She is noted for both her dramatic works, including Aria da capo, The Lamp and the Bell, and the libretto composed for an opera, The King’s Henchman, and for such lyric verses as ‘Renascence’ and the poems found in the collections A Few Figs From Thistles, Second April, and The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. She was one of the most skilful writers of sonnets in the 20th century.

‘Hallaig’ by Sorley MacLean

sniffing at the grass-grown ruined homes; / his eye will freeze in the wood, / his blood will not be traced while I live.
a’ snòtach nan làraichean feòir; / thig reothadh air a shùil sa choille: / chan fhaighear lorg air fhuil rim bheò.

Sorley MacLean (1911-1996) was born on the island of Raasay, off Skye. He was brought up within a family and community immersed in Gaelic language and culture, particularly song. He studied English at Edinburgh University from 1929, taking a first-class honours degree and eventually adopted Gaelic as the medium most appropriate for his poetry. MacLean also translated much of his own work into English, opening it up to a wider public than the some 80,000 speakers of the Gaelic language. ‘Hallaig’ was first published in the Gaelic journal Gairm in 1954 and is an intense meditation on the effects of the Clearances. MacLean’s home island Raasay was cleared (during the Scottish Clearances) between 1852 and 1854.

‘Trim’ by Yali Saweda Kamara

I wear / your black / cursive / on my chin, / & imagine / being the / teenaged boy / that you will / raise / with a lover / that looks / like me.

Yalie Saweda Kamara is a Sierra Leonean American writer, educator and researcher. Selected as the 2022–2023 Cincinnati and Mercantile Library Poet Laureate (2-year term) and a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, she is the editor of the anthology What You Need to Know About Me: Young Writers on Their Experience of Immigration. She is the author of the full-length collection Besaydoo (Milkweed Editions, 2024) and the chapbooks A Brief Biography of My Name and When the Living Sing. She is an assistant professor of English at Xavier University and resides in Cincinnati.

‘The Key of Water’ by Octavio Paz (translated from Spanish by Paul Weinfield)

You said: / Le pays est plein de sources. / That night I dipped my hands in your breasts. 

Octavio Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City to a family of Spanish and native Mexican descent. He was educated in law and literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In 1962, Paz became Mexico’s ambassador to India and resigned six years later in protest. Octavio Paz received the Miguel de Cervantes Prize in 1981, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1982, and the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1998.

‘Ellen West’ by Frank Bidart

At twelve, pancakes / became the most terrible thought there is … // I shall defeat ‘Nature’. // In the hospital, when they / weigh me, I wear weights secretly sewn into my belt.

Frank Bidart is the author of a dozen collections of poetry, including Metaphysical Dog, Watching the Spring Festival, Star Dust, Desire, and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–1990. He has won many prizes, including the Wallace Stevens Award, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His book Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and the 2017 National Book Award. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ‘Ellen West’ is a persona poem based on the English translation of the case study ‘Der Fall Ellen West’ by Dr Ludwig Binswanger. The poem follows the life and death of Ellen West, a woman who suffered from anorexia nervosa and an identity crisis.

‘Half-Light’ by Frank Bidart

We have not spoken in years. I thought / perhaps at ninety or a hundred, two // broken-down old men, we wouldn’t / give a damn, and find speech.

‘Chocolate’ by Jinhao Xie

Summer rests his head on your shoulder, / thirsts on your teenage sweat; a young love bursts / on twines and twigs. Green Beetle parks / by the foot of the hill. It’s summer. Everything melts.

Jinhao Xie is a UK-based poet, born in Chengdu. Their poetry, inspired by the mundane, has appeared in Poetry Review, Harana, Bath Magg, and elsewhere.

‘Why I am not a good kisser’ by Mary Ruefle

Because every kiss is like throwing a pair of doll’s eyes / Into the air and trying to follow them with your own.

Mary Ruefle is the author of My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013) and Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has published ten books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It, 2008), and a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed!. Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honours, teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College and was the poet laureate of Vermont from 2019 to 2024. In 2020, she was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow.

‘In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down’ by Andrea Gibson

Why did I go so long believing I owed the world / my disappointment? Why did I want to take // the world by storm when I could have taken it / by sunshine, by rosewater, by the cactus flowers / on the side of the road where I broke down? /

Andrea Gibson (1975-2025) was born in Calais, Maine. They authored seven albums and seven poetry books, including You Better Be Lightning (Button Poetry, 2021); Lord of the Butterflies (Button Poetry, 2018); Take Me With You (Penguin, 2018); Pansy (Write Bloody Publishing, 2015); The Madness Vase (Write Bloody Publishing, 2011); and Pole Dancing to Gospel Hymns (Write Bloody Publishing, 2010). They co-authored the prose work How Poetry Can Change Your Heart (Chronicle Books, 2019). They also edited We Will Be Shelter: Poems for Survival (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), an anthology that addresses social justice issues. In 2008, Gibson won the first Women of the World Poetry Slam. In 2023, they were poet laureate of Colorado and in 2024 received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Come See Me in the Good Light (2025) is a film about their life.

‘Artichokes’ by Bianca Stone

I’ve seen the last of it: an ache. / To be saved. There are wildfires / switching course to worry about. / I take my daughter to the lake and watch her feel the tiny waves. / A seagull lifts a sandwich right from my hands.

Bianca Stone became poet laureate of Vermont in May 2024. Bianca Stone is a granddaughter of acclaimed Goshen poet Ruth Stone, who served as Vermont’s sixth poet laureate, from 2007 to 2011. The elder Stone, a National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist, died in 2011 at age 96. Since then, Bianca Stone has carried on her grandmother’s legacy. Soon after Ruth’s death, Stone cofounded the poetry nonprofit Ruth Stone House in Goshen, which she renovated and turned into an artists’ retreat; it’s now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. There, Stone teaches in-person and online classes on poetry; hosts a podcast, Ode & Psyche; and serves as editor-at-large of the online art and poetry quarterly Iterant.

‘#blessed’ by Rosalie Moffett

This morning, all I want is to look unharmed, to know you were / meeting me at the mouth of this world. What to call that feeling in the mind like a magnet pulling toward the fridge? // Blessing inches toward blessure. A green beetle hovers above the speckled throat of a lily. My longing unfolds like / a pocketknife. I am so close to answering you.

Rosalie Moffett is the author of the poetry collections Making a Living (Milkweed Editions, 2025), Nervous System (Ecco, 2019), which was chosen by Monica Youn for the National Poetry Series Prize and listed by the New York Times as a New and Notable book, and June in Eden (OSU Press, 2017). She has been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, POETRY Magazine, New England Review, and Kenyon Review, among others. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern Indiana, and the senior poetry editor for the Southern Indiana Review.

‘From Blossoms’ by Li-Young Lee

O, to take what we love inside, / to carry within us an orchard, to eat / not only the skin, but the shade, / not only the sugar, but the days, to hold / the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into / the round jubilance of peach.

Li-Young Lee is the author of The Invention of the Darling (W. W. Norton, 2024); The Undressing (W. W. Norton, 2018); Behind My Eyes (W. W. Norton, 2008); Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; The City in Which I Love You (BOA Editions, 1990), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose (BOA Editions, 1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. Lee is the recipient of the 2024 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and many other prestigious prizes.

‘We Came Here to Get Away from You’ by Donika Kelly

leached into my softest parts. I wanted / to hold her shoulders, vomit into her mouth / this water full of dead or dying, / to fill her with a little knowing, / change her, heavy her, let the knowing wash

Donika Kelly is the author of The Natural Order of Things, The Renunciations and Bestiary. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and Pushcart Prize winner. She teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.

‘Grand Canyon’ by Laura Elvery

‘Grand Canyon’ is from Laura Elvery’s Ordinary Matter, her second collection – a suite of 20 stories inspired by women honoured with Nobel Prizes for their scientific research. Marie Curie won the prize twice. In ‘Grand Canyon’, Madame Curie and her daughters Eve and Irene are visiting America and local yokel Frank Wagner (24) has the job of watching out for them and showing them around. Frank is attracted to Eve, who is just 16. When she speaks French, he says, it is like ‘a vast and perfect galaxy’, ‘a bowl of strawberries and cream’. He finds Irene ‘a bit wonky-looking’ and Madame Curie, ‘brittle and intimidating but also extraordinary’. When Frank takes the Curies to ‘his first Indian reservation’ he is affronted that ‘the Indian kids are running around like nothing exciting is going on at all – do they not care about French people? Or about how many tonnes of pitchblende the girls’ mother sifted through to find smidgens of radium?’ The story perfectly captures the atmosphere of the period: the wealth and power of dynasties involved in industries like steel, rail, oil and dynamite, the fascination with scientific exploration, and the differences between Europeans and Americans. At the Grand Canyon, we get a hint that Curie’s groundbreaking work with radium is making her sick. Here’s a quote …

‘Madame has fallen onto her side, her black dress trapped under her like a terrible wave. He catches sight of her white face. Her eyes are closed, her mouth is slack. What is going through her mind, so far from home?’

Laura Elvery is the author of Trick of the Light and Ordinary Matter, which won the 2021 Steele Rudd Award for a Short Story Collection and was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Award for a Work of State Significance and the 2022 Barbara Jefferis Award. Her work has been published in numerous literary journals and she has won the Josephine Ulrick Prize for Literature, the Margaret River Short Story Competition, the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize and the Fair Australia Prize for Fiction. Nightingale is her first novel and it won the People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year in 2025. She lives in Brisbane.

‘Once the Shore’ by Paul Yoon

The dream-like setting and mysterious tone of this story is perfect for this tale about a young waiter and an American widow who are both dealing with loss. The waiter’s loss: a brother drowned at sea. The widow’s: a husband departed. The story shows how losing someone can hit home in stages and that these waves of grief can even occur while the person is still alive. We see how relationships and the stories we tell about them evolve, making losses inevitable. Memories can seem like shifting sands or serve as a salve or life raft. Here are some quotes:

‘She went on: “To wait. It is a fever. And I waited for him. But the man whom I knew, he never came. So I want to remember him. Not the one who returned. But the one who never left.”’

‘When his scent was of soap. When he would have done such an act as pick up a stone and write their initials in the mouth of a cave. Caged in the loose sketching of a heart.’

Paul Yoon is the author of four previous works of fiction: Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book; Snow Hunters, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award; The Mountain, which was an NPR Best Book of the Year; and Run Me to Earth, which was one of Time’s Must-Read Books of 2020 and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in the Hudson Valley, New York.

‘A Little Burst’ by Elizabeth Strout

I attended a course on short story fundamentals with the ASA in December 2024, and the story we analysed was ‘A Little Burst’ by Elizabeth Strout from Olive Kitteridge. What a gem. At her son’s wedding: ‘All afternoon Olive has been fighting the sensation of moving underwater – a panicky, dismal feeling, since she has somehow never managed to learn to swim.’ Olive steals and rearranges a few of her new daughter-in-law’s possessions – revenge for mockery of the dress she has made specially for the event and for presuming to know Olive’s son as well or better than she does. My heart breaks for Olive because she is lonely, beset by her own frailties, and apprehensive about her son’s future. She is also searingly perceptive and melodramatic. Here’s a quote:

‘Anyway, the day is almost over. Olive stares up at the skylight over the bed and reassures herself that she has, apparently, lived through it. She pictured herself having another heart attack on the day of her son’s wedding: She would be sitting on her folding chair on the lawn, exposed to everyone, and after her son said, “I do,” she would silently, awkwardly fall over dead, with her face pressed into the grass and her big hind end with the gauzy geranium print stuck up in the air. People would talk about it for days to come.’

‘Hard Water’ by Raven Leilani

Edie is a 23-year-old Black woman who gets a job as a submarine librarian for the US Department of Defense at its Bethesda base. As she works on the catalogue, she learns a few facts, like ‘the difference between infrasonic and ultrasonic frequencies – one a lank delta wave and the other a ragged cosine – and the difference between active and passive sonar, which was technically the difference between a mouth and an ear.’ She is also attracted to her supervisor, Alex, who is Black, too, and has a prosthetic leg. Despite really needing the job, Edie flouts the rules and takes several things home. Is she committing a serious offence like treason? Is she putting herself and others at risk? Edie is intrigued by the submarines, and the scene where she is being submerged in a Triton 3600 with Alex is tightly woven and oppressive. The ending is also marvellously mysterious.

‘“I need this job,” she answered, sliding the ticket into her purse. But this was nothing new. Her life had been shaped principally by need. The want had been used early and frivolously, on a tongue piercing that became so infected that she could no longer roll her rs, on a string of druggy, sanguine white boys, and in undergrad, on a post-modern exploration of the villanelle. Now, she could not afford to have principles. She could not afford shampoo. “And because I love my country.”’

Raven Leilani is an American writer whose debut novel Luster was released in 2020 to critical acclaim. ‘Hard Water’ was published in 2016 in Cosmonauts Avenue.

‘Ghost Kitchen’ by Ross Raisin

This broody story is about the underground Fast Food industry and how it treats its employees; especially immigrants who need the work and will do it despite being abused on the job, which includes lower pay packets and cruel jibing. Sean lands in the industry after a tragedy, which has left him numb. His two ‘underground’ jobs are working at the fryer or ‘the pod’ (as the workers call the isolated units they toil in) and cycling take-out orders around the city. Working two jobs makes him a ‘sucker for punishment’ he tells his co-worker Ebdo.

The story reveals that ghost kitchens, or dark kitchens, are ‘so-called in part because they have no windows, no way for anybody on the outside to see in’; and they are ‘often on the outskirts of urban areas’; ‘concealed islands that sometimes create the conditions for darkness to flourish.’ Raisin has done a great job of weaving a compelling story that raises an important societal issue and also evokes our empathy for people doing it tough. Here’s a quote:

‘He could piece together only fragments: Mehmet and Dougie running away into the night, the boiled banknotes lying on the floor like damp flowerheads, the shock of new pain when Ebdo had slowly wrapped his hand with cling film. Ebdo, sitting on the ground beside him, had heard the siren too.’

Ross Raisin was born and brought up on Silsden Moor in West Yorkshire. He is the author of four novels: A Hunger (2022), A Natural (2017), Waterline (2011) and God’s Own Country (2008). His work has won and been shortlisted for over ten literary awards. Ross has written short stories for Granta, Prospect, the Sunday Times, Esquire, BBC Radio 3 and 4, among others, and in 2018 published a book for the Read This series, on the practice of fiction writing: Read This if you Want to be a Great Writer. He lives in York with his wife and two children.

‘Roy’ by Emma Binder

Great setting. Great characters. Great evolution of the main character, Sophie, niece of Roy who says she’s ‘the tough guy’ to her younger sister’s ‘princess’. Roy has been asked to look after his nieces while their mother and father go to be with their grandmother while she is dying. Roy is the brother of the girls’ dad. He is a drinker, a gambler, a womaniser, and ‘a purveyor of what other, lesser men call trash’. He is also a hunter and a romantic, describing his love for the girls’ mother (whom he declares he once made love with) beautifully: ‘I’ve got a porch around my heart for that woman, to this day.’ Roy’s rough and tumble ways of being and his down-to-earth companionship frees Sophie to grow wilder and stronger – to become more fully what she really needs and wants to be. This runs contrary to what she encounters in her fledgling friendship with some local girls, which goes nowhere after the girlish clothes they make her try on don’t really fit. This unusual and superbly rendered coming of age story is from The Best Short Stories 2024: The O. Henry Prize Winners, chosen by guest editor Amor Towles and series editor Jenny Minton Quigley. Here are some quotes:

‘A violet scar stretched from his temple to his chin, cleaving his face like a crack in a vase. He looked at us and grinned. A tooth was missing from either side of his mouth.

“My nieces,” he said. “In living color. You two look just like your mom.”’

‘Behind them on the road, I tried to pedal faster, focusing only on the crunch of my tires against gravel and the steady pulse of my heart. Ahead of me, Natalie and Lauren erupted in laughter, like two roses blooming at the same time.’

‘The room was thick with light. There was a spark growing inside me, calling me into a different future, like a train hurtling fast into the wilderness.’

Emma Binder is a writer from Wisconsin and a 2023-2025 Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. They earned their MFA in Fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and have received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Vermont Studio Center, and Writing By Writers. They received an O. Henry Prize, the Indiana Review Fiction Prize, the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, and a Wisconsin Writers Award. Their short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Best American Short Stories, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and elsewhere. Currently based in Oakland, they are working on a novel.

‘Spillway’ by Djuna Barnes

As the Telegraph UK puts it the newly published collection of Djuna Barnes’s short fiction, I Am Alien to Life, stars ‘rotting corpses, grieving loners and men with whips’. ‘Spillway’ features Mrs Julie Anspacher who has returned from the sanatorium where she has had a lengthy stay due to her tuberculosis. She brings her dying child conceived with a now-dead lover home with her and tries to explain to her husband why she has done this. She also tries to talk with him about her misery – but he remains baffled and aggrieved. The story has a dramatic and uncertain ending. We fear the worst because Julie has been tormented, ‘suffering without a consummation, it’s like insufficient sleep; it’s like anything that is without proportion’. She says she wants to feel what she should feel but she’s ‘stood so much for so long she is worn down by the interminable discipline of learning to stand everything’. Like many of Barnes’ stories, this one’s bleak and probes the human condition in its alienation and absurdity. Here are some quotes:

‘Darkness was closing in, it was eating away the bushes and the barn, and it rolled in the odours of the orchard.’

‘… torment should have some meaning. I did not want to go beyond you, or to have anything beyond you – that was not the idea at all. I thought there was to be no more me. I wanted to leave nothing behind but you, only you. You must believe this or I can’t bear it …’

Djuna Barnes (1892-198) was born on Storm King Mountain in New York State. She worked as a journalist during World War I before leaving the United States to spend the inter-war years in Paris and London among the most celebrated writers nd artists of the twentieth century. She returned to New York in 1941 and lived in Grenwich village until her death. She published three novels as well as short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, skits, and a three-act play between 1914 and 1950. She had a brief and tragic romance with journalist Mary Pyne, who died of tuberculosis in 1919, attended to by Barnes until the end.

‘The Wavemaker Falters’ by George Saunders

Saunders is masterful at writing about sad men who spiral into decline in the arms of destiny. ‘Nothing’s gone right for me since the day I crushed the boy with the wavemaker,’ says the protagonist in ‘The Wavemaker Falters’ – and yes, things only get worse for him as he lives with the guilt of the accident and the pall it casts over his capacity to work and be present in his romantic relationship. Saunders’ superpower here is to enable us to empathise with the man and, by the end of the story, we join him in his plea of ‘enough already’. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (which features ‘The Wavemaker Falters’) was Saunders’ first short story collection, and I agree with his publisher who says, Saunders’ ‘vision of our near future is as black and funny as you can get’. (And I’d add excruciatingly sad, sometimes, too.)

‘Simone sleeps through the whole thing, making little puppy sounds and pushing her rear against my front to remind me even in her sleep how long its been. But you try it. You kill a nice little kid via neglect and then enjoy having sex. If you can do it you’re demented.’

George Saunders was born in 1958 in Texas and trained as a geophysical engineer. In 1988, he obtained an MA in creative writing from Syracuse University and went on to teach on the MFA program. His works comprise several collections of short stories, including Tenth of December (2013) and Liberation (2022), a novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005), and several novels, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English. In 2006 Saunders was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2009 he received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Rochester, US, with his wife and children.

‘Cello’ by Andrew Porter

‘Cello’ is the moving story of how Natalie and her husband David are bearing the load of a recently diagnosed neurological disorder which is robbing Natalie of her fine motor coordination and concentration. David clings to the specialist’s words about it being too early for an accurate diagnosis but it soon becomes clear Natalie will not be able to continue with her very accomplished quartet or with her tenure as a music professor. Her studio is a glass cube in the backyard, which gives David the chance to see her movements. It also underscores her separateness. He wants to reach her in their shared grief – but the way to do this is not clear to him. There are many stories of loss (literal and figurative) in The Disappeared by Andrew Porter, whose first collection The Theory of Light and Matter has long been a favourite of mine. It also did not surprise me to learn that Porter admires the stories of Manuel Muñoz as both authors share a gift for creating melancholic atmospheres that linger long after the finer details of their stories have evaporated. In the case of The Disappeared, Porter said he tried to put a lot of details into the stories that he associated with the atmosphere of San Antonio and Austin, some of which are no more.

‘I remember watching the way her bow moved, so fluidly, as if it were an extension of her body, a part of her arm, and the way she closed her eyes at certain points in the performance and seemed to disappear within herself, the way her breathing sped up and then slowed down as the tempo increased or fell off, and the way she seemed to brighten at certain moments, as if awakened from a dream or a trance. It was all very intimate and hypnotic and I found it hard to look away from her, hard not to stare at her, even as the performance was ending.’

Andrew Porter is the author of the story collection The Theory of Light and Matter and the novel In Between Days. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His work has appeared in One Story, The Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, Narrative, The Southern Review, and on Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. He teaches at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

‘Follow-up’ by Curtis Sittenfeld

Janie is anxiously waiting for the results of a breast biopsy, and we soon learn that ‘because low-level dread is often inside Janie, the first thing she thinks is, Ah, yes, the notification of my premature death – I was expecting you.’ Janie uses the waiting time to reflect on her life choices, to take stock: She can (and does) tell her friend Pippa anything and their exchanges are intimate, but her long marriage has worn down her capacity to communicate deeply with David her husband. ‘She prepares her face for him’ and, even readied like this, she still can’t tell him her health worries. What if she’d further pursued the fling she’d with a warm and wonderful barista just before she married David? Would she feel more fulfilled? It’s a moot question because she has a strong and irreplaceable bond with Evan, Janie and David’s child. At one point Janie says to David, ‘If you want to know what it means when Evan wears pearl earrings, ask him.’ ‘Follow-up’ is one of the many great stories in Sittenfeld’s collection Show Don’t Tell. Here are some quotes:

‘“Salami smells like armpits,” Evan says. “In a good or bad way?” Janie asks, and it works – Evan laughs.’

‘Or perhaps it’s a story about how precious it is to deeply adore two people in the world, even if neither of them is your spouse, and to share part of every day with them? Isn’t this, after all, two more people than anyone is guaranteed?’

Curtis Sittenfeld is the bestselling author of seven novels, stories and non-fiction. Her books have been selected by The New York Times, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and People for their “Ten Best Books of the Year” lists, optioned for television and film, and translated into thirty languages. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Esquire, and in the Best American Short Stories anthology, of which she was the 2020 guest editor.

‘Chugger’ by Emma Darragh

‘Chugger’ is from Emma Darragh’s debut collection Thanks for Having Me. It is set in a Wollongong shopping centre and features Vivian, a woman so stressed and time poor, she cannot stand the fact that the charity collectors (chuggers) are trying to do their (irritating) job and converse with her. She wants to tell them to f*&^ off but the guy in front of her has done this. She’s trapped. Instead, when the chugger asks if she cares about animals she says, ‘No, not really,’ and pushes past. Vivian is doing some grocery shopping for her young daughter Evie who is coming to stay the next day. She doesn’t have enough money to pay for all the items, so she takes several out, pays and leaves the shop. The chugger gets her again – and it’s here that the story gets wilder (no spoilers here, you’ll have to read it yourself). Here are some quotes:

‘…Vivian knows she keeps letting Evie down, in the smallest of ways, and can’t seem to help it.’

‘There she is. But it isn’t really her – it can’t be. It’s not her face. No, it’s a mask – a white mask, the kind of cheap white mask actors wear. Her features are hard and her lips are a colourless line. Her eyes look more like eyeholes than actual eyes.’

Emma Darragh lives and works in Wollongong. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wollongong. Her writing has appeared in numerous Australian publications, including Cordite, Westerly, Meniscus, TEXT, The Suburban Review, Swim Meet Lit Mag, and The Big Issue Fiction Edition. Her PhD, ‘The Short Story Cycle in the Twenty-First Century’, was awarded with Examiners’ Commendation for Outstanding Thesis. Emma’s debut novel-in-stories, Thanks for Having Me, was the winner of the 2024 Readings New Australian Fiction Prize.

‘Obit’ (from section III) by Victoria Chang

My children, children / today my hands are dreaming / as they touch your hair. / Your hair turns into winter. / When I die, your hair will snow.

Victoria Chang is the author of The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022); the nonfiction book, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (Milkweed Editions, 2021); and Obit (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and the Director of Poetry@Tech.

‘Door’ by Olumide Manuel

It reminds me of the one true love that shattered me / in the most comfortable penance—How we fell in / & out each other with unedged thorns, / doors absentia, wilding our bodies in full speed. / Arrows of clean delight, limbs oxbowed in floral wings.

Olumide Manuel is a poet, educator and an environmentalist. He is a 2x nominee for the Pushcart award, a Best of the Net nominee and the winner of the Ake Climate Change Poetry Prize 2022. His poems have been published in Up The Staircase Quarterly, Trampset, Gigantic Sequins, A Long House, Waccamaw Journal, Fiyah Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Frontier Poetry, Ake Journal, Reckoning Press, and elsewhere.

‘Someday I’ll Love—’ by Emerald ᏃᏈᏏ GoingSnake

like I dreamt of the lamb—slaughtered, / forgotten, / lying on porcelain tile, on crimson-filled grout— / and woke up thinking of my grandmother, / of her Betty Boop hands that held / marbled stone, held dough-balled flour, / held the first strands of my hair floating atop the river— /

Emerald ᏃᏈᏏ GoingSnake is an Indigenous poet from the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Oklahoma. Winner of the 2024 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award for poetry and the recipient of the 2023 Indigenous Nations Poets fellowship, they live in Santa Fe.

‘Love in a cold climate’ by Christine De Luca

the dream she planted / and the praise within her look / as she staked it, willing / the one rose to open, / to hold twilight.

Christine De Luca is a Scottish poet and novelist who was born and raised in Shetland. She writes in both English and Shaetlan (Shetlandic), the latter a form of Old Scots with much Norse influence. For the past five decades, De Luca has lived in Edinburgh, where in 2014 she was appointed the city’s fourth Makar – a Scottish honour akin to Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight poetry collections.

‘Juke’ by Diane Seuss

I was young. I looked like a Rubens / painting of a woman half-eaten / by moths. What lucky / debauchery, the ride back // on a washboard dirt road, / taking everything for granted, / flipping off the aurora borealis / like it was some three-toothed human / in flashy clothes dancing / to get my attention. / I wasn’t a mean drunk then, / just honest.

Diane Seuss was born in Indiana and raised in Michigan. Seuss is the author of the poetry collections Frank: Sonnets (2021), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (2018); Four-Legged Girl (2015), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (2010), winner of the 2009 Juniper Prize for Poetry; and It Blows You Hollow (1998).

‘How to Apologize’ by Ellen Bass

So you’ll need a boat. You could rent or buy, / but, for the sake of repairing the world, / build your own. Thin strips / of Western red cedar are perfect, / but don’t cut a tree. There’ll be / a demolished barn or downed trunk / if you venture further. / And someone will have a mill. / And someone will loan you tools. / The perfume of sawdust and the curls / that fall from your plane / will sweeten the hours.

Ellen Bass was born in Philadelphia in 1947 and grew up in New Jersey. She received a BA from Goucher College and an MA in creative writing from Boston University, where she studied with Anne Sexton. She is the author of nine poetry collections, the most recent of which is Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020).

‘The Language of Bleak Averages’ by Anthony Lawrence

then a plate of fretworked bone, lifted clear to expose / the source of my father’s unbalanced body and moods – // a tumour, like the dark, cystic head of a swamp flower / grafted to a host of nerveless coils.

Anthony Lawrence is an important figure in contemporary Australian poetry. He has received numerous grants, awards and prizes, is widely read and anthologised, with 12 collections of poetry. Besides poetry he has written a novel, In the Half Light (Picador, 2000). Fishing, the coast and the ocean are recurrent subjects in Lawrence’s work, as is death and poets.

‘Plague’s Monologue’ by Lynn Emanuel

And the last few words huddled together, like bees in a hive buzzing and plotting? I cut their throats with the scythe of a comma, turned the snout of my pen against them.

Lynn Emanuel is the author of five books of poetry. Her most recent book, The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected, was awarded the Lenore Marshall Award by The Academy of American Poets.

‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ by Langston Hughes

I’ve known rivers: / Ancient, dusky rivers. // My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idealization and negative stereotypes.

‘Evening Traffic’ by Bret Shepard

Lost // on the trails of others, lost in reflection / most nights – memories like the melt that was once ice. What is // lost outside moves without you.

Bret Shepard is from Alaska. He is author of the collection Absent Here, which was awarded AWP’s 2023 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and published as part of the Pitt Poetry Series. Another collection, Place Where Presence Was, won the Moon City Poetry Prize. Bret’s chapbook The Territorial received the Midwest Chapbook Prize from the Laurel Review and GreenTower Press; and Negative Compass was awarded the Wells College Chapbook Prize.

‘Recreation’ by Audre Lorde

moving through our word countries / my body / writes into your flesh / the poem / you make of me. // Touching you I catch midnight

Audre Lorde was an American writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet and civil rights activist. Lorde wrote eighteen books of essays and poetry, for which she won numerous awards, including the American Book Award for A Burst of Light. ‘Recreation’ is from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde.

‘Febrile’ by William Fox (Judith Wright Poetry Prize – Runner up)

Later, it was hypothesised / my little sister had been lying in / the sun too long. There was / a local cricket game on, / and she was lying stomach-down / fingerpainting paths of kikuyu / out near the boundary line.

William Fox is from Naarm / Melbourne. His work has appeared in most major Australian literary journals. He holds a PhD in Australian Literary Studies from Melbourne University and works in law. His debut collection, Apollo Bay, was released by Rabbit in 2023. ‘Febrile’ was runner up in the Judith Wright Poetry Prize.

‘Daughters’ by Phoebe Stuckes

Let us want none of what anchored our mothers / Let us never evolve to be good or beautiful / Let us spit and snarl and rattle the hatches / Let us never be conquered /Let us no longer keep keys in our knuckles

Phoebe Stuckes is a writer from West Somerset. She has been a winner of the Foyle Young Poets award four times and is a former Barbican Young Poet. She has performed at the Southbank Centre, Waterstones Trafalgar Square, Wenlock Poetry Festival and was the Ledbury Festival young poet in residence in 2015. She has also read her work on BBC Radio 3. Her writing has appeared in The Rialto, The North, The Morning Star, Ash and Ambit. Her debut pamphlet, Gin & Tonic is available from Smith|Doorstop books and was shortlisted for The Michael Marks Award 2017. Her first full-length collection, Platinum Blonde, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2020.

‘Daphne’ by Ellora Sutton

I could not run / so I took root, still as a housewife, / stagnant. // My eyelids went first. / Desiccated to tracing paper / to sandpaper. / You, in your gleaming arrogance, you could never foresee this

Ellora Sutton is an MA student from Hampshire. She has won many awards, including the Mslexia Poetry Competition, the Artlyst Art to Poetry Award, and the Pre-Raphaelite Society Poetry Competition.

‘Rainy Day’ by Bert Meyers

Now, the rain, the iron rain, with its little keys / is closing all the doors . . . // and I think we’re all dead. See how the sky / sits like a tombstone on the roofs.

Bert Meyers was a self-taught lyric poet, picture framer, gilder, teacher, and rebel. He was born in Los Angeles in 1928 and died in 1979. Six books of his poetry were published in his lifetime and three posthumously. The most recent book is Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master published by Pleiades Press. The website bertmeyers.com has more information on him with a selection of his poetry, essays about him, audio recordings, videos and more.

The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes – This is climate fiction at its best and most poignant and, as Hughes notes, ‘Climate change is contemporary realism. It will become stranger and stranger to avoid it in your fiction.’ My #1! Moving and riveting.

Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane – These 12 connected short stories revolve around serial killing but it’s not the murders or murderer that McFarlane is most interested in rather the ripple effect of the murderer’s brutality. Dark, clever and intriguing.

The Deed by Susannah Begbie – Four fractious siblings with four days to build their dead father’s coffin together or be stripped of his sizable inheritance. Begbie’s brilliant debut features a vivid rural setting and bucketloads of humour and heart.

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan – This brilliant book blends memoir, history and auto-fiction. Flanagan’s father was enslaved near Hiroshima when the atom bomb was dropped. (And Flanagan once trapped on a wild river.) A deft tale of love and choices.

Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson – At Burton Makepeace House a prize painting by Turner has gone missing. Enter seasoned private investigator Jackson Brodie and DC Reggie Chase in this clever twist on a classic murder mystery.

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch – A breathless, claustrophobic and disturbing novel depicting a dystopian Ireland, which reflects the reality of war-torn countries and the terror of those who flee them. Eilish quickly becomes desperate. A must read.

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout – Part of this little beauty features Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge swapping stories about people they have known. Much of it explores how our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, ‘Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.’

Long Island by Colm Toibin – Ellis Lacey (Brooklyn) is an Irish woman in America, married with two children to Tony Fiorello. Her dislocation is compounded when she hears Tony has fathered a child to another woman. She returns to Ireland where past love haunts her …

Sleeping on Islands by Andrew Motion – This is a moving memoir by a former poet laureate and major figure in British poetry for whom W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin were formative. A nuanced account of the risks, sacrifices and joys of a poetic life.

Red River Road by Anna Downes – Set in the van-life scene on Australia’s West Coast, this is a twisty outback thriller. Katy’s search for the truth behind her sister Phoebe’s disappearance is harrowing. A key theme is women’s empowerment.

Canticle Creek by Adrian Hyland – Jesse Redpath is a savvy cop who isn’t from Canticle Creek, which makes her the perfect person to uncover the truth behind the town’s recent murders. Possum is a great local ally. But will they survive the inferno?

Also great: We All Lived in Bondi Then by Georgia Blain, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, The Pole and Other Stories by JM Coetzee, Graft by Maggie MacKellar, Wall by Jen Craig, Lent Poems by Kate Cayley, The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks, Your Ad Could Go Here by Oksana Zabuzhko, West Girls by Elizabeth Woollett, Florida by Lauren Groff, The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found by Frank Bruni, Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr.

‘Object Permanence’ by Madeleine Cravens

The end’s already in motion, the end was starting this whole / time and today Brooklyn is a beautiful, devastating autumn. / Everyone I love is dancing in the plaza. A band plays below

Madeleine Cravens is the author of Pleasure Principle, published by Scribner in June 2024. Her poems can be found in The New Yorker, The Nation, Kenyon Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. Madeleine is currently 2022-2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She received her M.F.A. from Columbia University, where she was a Max Ritvo Poetry Fellow. She has been the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute. She lives in Oakland.

‘Come wilderness into our homes’ by Daniela Danz

(Translated from the German by Monika Cassel)

come rising sea levels / up over our shorelines both the developed / and the undeveloped the homey / lowland areas wash / jellyfish into our soup bowls / and ramshorn snails into our hair / as we swim in each other’s direction panicked / with our yearning for one another

Daniela Danz is the author of four books of poetry, Serimunt, Pontus, V, and Wildniß, two novels, Lange Fluchten and Türmer, and the libretto for “Der Mordfall Halit Yozgat,” an opera by Ben Frost based on one of the ten murders carried out by the right-wing NSU. Danz was named poet laureate of Tübingen in 2012 and has received numerous grants and awards, including the 2019 German Prize for Nature Writing, the 2020.

Monika Cassel’s poems and translations from German have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Poetry, The Georgia Review, Guesthouse, and Poetry Northwest, among others. Her chapbook Grammar of Passage (flipped eye publishing, 2021) won the Venture Poetry Award and she was a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press inaugural Rhine Translation Prize.

‘Yes It Will Rain (or Prayer for Our First Home)’ by Patrick Rosal

I know  / we’ve had a monsoon  / of grieving to do  / which is why  / I promise    to lie / beside you  /for as long as you like  / or need  / We’ll let our elbows / kiss     under the downpour  / until we’re soaked  / like two huge nets  /                    left  /beside the sea

Patrick Rosal is the author of The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems (Persea Books, 2021), Brooklyn Antediluvian (Persea Books, 2016), winner of the 2017 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Boneshepherds (Persea, 2011).

‘Just as the Darkness Got Very Dark / Another Data Point’ by Erika Meitner

I’ve been driving since / before he was born. / He is sixteen. Does he know // the black hole of loving / and not being loved in return, / the night and its volume?

Erika Meitner is the author of six poetry collections including Useful Junk (BOA Editions, 2022), Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), and  Copia (BOA Editions, 2014).

‘If It Happens to You’ by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

How do you go to bed when you have just run over a sheep? Trembling on the /
edge of the bed your cold hands like raw steaks over your eyes, her hand // forms half an orange which presses heavily upon your knee, back and forth

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld is considered one of the rising stars in contemporary Dutch literature. In 2015 Rijneveld published Kalfsvlies (‘Calf’s Caul’), a collection of poetry which was awarded the C. Buddingh’ Prize for best Dutch-language poetry debut, prompting the daily newspaper de Volkskrant to proclaim her the national literary talent of the year. In 2020 she was awarded the International Booker Prize for her novel The Discomfort of Evening, translated by Michele Hutchison.

‘A mathematics of breathing’ by Carl Phillips

to win another night of watching the prince / drift into a deep sleeping beside her, // the chance to touch one more time / his limbs, going, // gone soft already with dreaming. / When she tells her own story

Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet. He is a Professor of English at Washington University in St Louis. In 2023, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.

‘A Welcome’ by Joanna Klink

No one stays unscathed / but you have days of summer to grow / into your thoughts and learn the great /caring tasks. You have yards of treelight / to race through under the birds’ low song- / swept radiances. The trills you hear /are glass grace. They are singing.

Joanna Klink is the author, most recently, of The Nightfields (Penguin Books, 2020). Her other poetry collections include Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy (Penguin Books, 2015), Raptus (Penguin Books, 2010), Circadian (Penguin Books, 2007), and They Are Sleeping (University of Georgia Press, 2000). She is teaching at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.

‘Of Daylight Saving Time, MyFitnessPal, and Indoor/Outdoor Cats’ by Jessica E. Johnson

Home: before the day starts birds eat away at silence. / Their twitter nibbles darkness into lace the printer / hums because you didn’t think to turn it off.

Jessica E. Johnson is the author of the book-length poem Metabolics (Acre Books), the chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press), and the forthcoming memoir Mettlework (Acre Books). Her poems and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Republic, River Teeth, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She lives in Portland, Oregon

‘The Age of Pleasure’ by Derrick Austin

For Erdem

The hottest day in the hottest week in human history. / Cats in shadow dodged the sun but not each other’s rage or lust,/ shredding and shrieking behind the Euro Plaza Hotel./ What had you done for seven weeks but get food poisoning / and your phone pickpocketed? The only person you knew / on the continent was your lover with a jellyfish tattooed on his back.

Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness, winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water, which was selected by Mary Szybist for the A. Poulin Jr, Poetry Prize. His third collection, This Elegance, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in Spring 2026. A Cave Canem fellow, he is the recipient of a Ron Wallace Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, a Stegner Fellowship, and an Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship. He lives in Austin, TX.

‘Surfacing’ by Stefanie Kirby

I woke up afraid I’d bled through the skin of my body. The furniture wept at the sight of all that blood. Breakfast: egg, berries bloodied, thawed. The egg softened into an eye.

Stefanie Kirby lives and writes along Colorado’s Front Range. Her debut, Fruitful (Driftwood, 2024), is the winner of the 2023 Adrift Chapbook Contest. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Best of the Net Anthology 2024, Pleiades, phoebe, The Massachusetts Review, The Maine Review, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere.

‘I wake at dawn to glimpse my barren chest and speak to the children I won’t birth.’ by Spencer Williams

My two delicate hums. / My pair of soft assemblies. // My want is a canary rattling the morning’s thin frame, / the steady breath of droplets following months of bad weather

Spencer Williams is a Mexican trans poet from Chula Vista, California. She is the author of TRANZ (Four Way Books, 2024).

‘Snow’ by Louis Macneice

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was / Spawning snow and pink roses against it / Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: / World is suddener than we fancy it.

Frederick Louis MacNeice CBE was an Irish poet, playwright and producer for the BBC. His poetry, which frequently explores themes of introspection, empiricism, and belonging, is considered to be among the greatest of 20th Century literature.

‘I’d Drive Anywhere with You’ by Kerry Greer

I don’t know how to say this any other way: / He’s not from here. He’s not like anyone / I’ve ever met. // He’s so pleased I ordered him a double / cheeseburger tonight. This is a once-a-month / treat. Fine dining, I say. You should see his face. / He’s six now, and he thinks this might go on / forever. This always growing up, these nights of / life contained and held.

Kerry Greer is an award-winning poet and writer based in Western Australia. She received the Venie Holmgren Prize for Environmental Poetry in 2021. Kerry has been shortlisted for the ABR Calibre Essay Prize, the Woollahra Digital Literary Award, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the ACU Poetry Prize, and more. As a widow and solo parent, Kerry has a particular interest in writing about grief and loss. Her debut poetry collection, The Sea Chest, was published by Recent Work Press in November 2023.

‘The Compline’ by Christian J. Collier

In bed, we discuss / our future, our children woven in myrrh, sitting // in some tomorrow, waiting for us to join & give them our science / so they can live. // I tell her what I fear: I’ll walk into fogged, writhen woods & die / when our babies are too young to carry my baritone with them. // I’ll become / the almost-stranger

Christian J. Collier is a Black, Southern writer and the author of the collection Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024). ‘The Compline’ is from Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024).

‘Splinter’ by Gwyneth Lewis

For Finnley, aged 3

In years to come, they will lodge in his heart. / I won’t be me with a sterilised pin / Dislodging dashes of wooden rain / Aslant in his sole. /

Gwyneth Lewis is one of the most prominent Welsh poets of her generation, and the first writer to take up the Welsh Laureateship. Born into a Welsh-speaking family, Lewis has been dubbed a ‘bilingual virtuoso’ – her first book in English, Parables & Faxes, won the Aldeburgh Festival Prize, and she has since received numerous prizes and accolades for writing in both her languages. ‘Splinter’ is from Sparrow Tree (Bloodaxe, 2011).

‘Transformation’ by Adam Zagajewski

(Translated by Clare Cavanagh)

September’s sweet dust gathered / on the windowsill and lizards / hid in the bends of walls. / I’ve taken long walks, / craving one thing only: / lightning, / transformation, / you.

Adam Zagajewski was a poet, novelist, and essayist. He was born in Lwów (Lviv), Ukraine, on June 21, 1945. He spent his childhood in Silesia and then in Cracow, where he graduated from Jagiellonian University. Zagajewski first became well known as one of the leading poets of the Generation of ’68, or the Polish New Wave (Nowa Fala), and is one of Poland’s most famous contemporary poets. His eight books of poetry in English include the posthumous collection True Life: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), first released in Poland in 2019 and translated into English by Clare Cavanagh;

‘Indeterminacy’ by J. Mae Barizo

You see I wanted a different kind of music / One that felt like a foreign city or ice cracking / A prediction of snow and then the snow itself endless

J. Mae Barizo is a poet, essayist and multidisciplinary artist who was born in Toronto. She is the author of the poetry collections Tender Machines (Tupelo Press, 2023) and The Cumulus Effect (Four Way Books, 2015). Barizo has been the recipient of awards from Poets House, MAP fund, Critical Minded, Bennington College, Opera America, and the Mellon Foundation. She was a 2024 Artist Resident at Baryshnikov Arts Center. Barizo is the chair of the undergraduate creative writing program and is part of the MFA faculty at The New School. She lives in New York City. She was inspired to write ‘Indeterminacy’ while reading the diaries of John Cage.