‘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.

‘The Mothers and The Girls’ by Saba Sams

In Send Nudes Saba Sams immerses us in the contradictions and complexities of girls and young women – revealing their vulnerability, power, intensity, desires, fickleness and confusion. From Sams’ fabulous debut collection, ‘Blue 4eva’ won the 2022 BBC National Short Story Award, and it is riveting. I also really liked ‘The Mothers and The Girls’ in which the mothers are talented trapeze artists, and the girls enjoy the freedom of being feral carnival kids running wild during festival season.

‘The audience became eerily quiet as the mothers flew through the nothing air like used tissues in their white silk dresses, arms thrown out as wings might be. Their bodies traced a perfect X against the ceiling of the tent. At the very last moment, they caught hold of the opposite bar and found safety. The crowd gasped. The girls turned and looked at River. He appeared breathless, slightly giddy.

‘Incredible, he said, just magic.’

‘Fortress’ by Elizabeth Woollett

I was floored by ‘Fortress’ from Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s West Girls, one in a series of cleverly interconnected short stories that probe how beauty can be diverting, powerful and costly. Insecurity, uncertainty, racial ambiguity, self-obsession, fat shaming and misogyny swirl in the sea in which the West Girls (Western Australian girls and women) swim. Sometimes, their desires drive them in deep where they’re able to hurt each other ‘in far more inventive ways than men hurt us’. What’s so spine-tingling about ‘Fortress’ is that the hurt extends to someone young and innocent, and the impact of Ciara and Luna’s liaison hits home brutally.

‘Under the spray, she’s slick as a fish, eyelashes wet, bikini dangling off the tap, circles of sand at her feet. So dazed and female, I just … do it. Press her against the daisy tiles and do everything, until the water runs cold, we’ve both got goosebumps, my knees are bruised.’

‘The Sewing Room’ by Mary Costello

The China Factory is a truly fine collection of short stories and ‘The Sewing Room’ is one of its 12 treasures. Mary Costello’s writing is said to have a similar heft to the marvellous John McGahern and William Trevor and I agree with this assessment. Alice is a schoolteacher who is retiring. She has also found great joy in designing clothes – and we can imagine her spending more time in her sewing room diverting herself from the harsh consequences of what was a single act of youthful passion. The grief, the guilt, the longing are all still in the ether decades later and we feel the sadness and the stoicism that has kept her together.

‘She thinks of her life, her whole existence, as a catastrophe. She drops her arm and the bag slides off and she thinks how everything has sprung from one moment, one deed – the insane beauty and shock of the flesh, the fire of the soul – with consequences that flowed out and touched and ruptured every minute and hour and day of her life ever since. …

‘Was it all fated, she wonders? Was the desire fated? And the shame? And the crime – was the crime fated, too?’

‘The Choc-Ice Woman’ by Mary Costello

This story, from Mary Costello’s collection Barcelona, is painful and achingly beautiful – with damage, a begrudging acceptance of life’s letdowns and the consolation of reading woven seamlessly through its pages. Frances’ older brother has died and Frances is in a hearse with the undertaker and the body of her brother, the latter in the very back, behind her head. We soon learn that Frances has seen how men get to choose, and women get to care. Her husband is not what he seemed at first glance, and his behaviour has had a profound effect on her fulfilling her heart’s desire. And yet he is also peaceable, demands little and she has loved him. The complexity Costello navigates in telling this moving story about families, love and marriage make this a must read.

‘When she first read the story, Frances had kept waiting for the child to be born to Tonka, but it was never mentioned. She found herself constantly thinking about the story, slipping into the pallid, shadowy realm that the protagonist inhabited. In that kind of daydreaming state, she experienced a floating sense of calm. It was not that she was briefly happy or more content, but that she existed at a deeper level than in her daily waking life.’

‘The Wolves’ by Josephine Rowe

Australian genius of the short story, Josephine Rowe, says ‘I’m just trying for a sentence that will carry the most essential impression, the greatest felt sense of place and character and weather and momentum in as distilled, organic a form as possible.’ This explains, at least in part, why so many of her sentences are absolute gems and why ‘The Wolves’ is such a great story – crackling with energy, urgency and perspicacity.

‘How was it? We grew up inside those crumbling estate houses, where kikuyu grass knuckled through indifferent brickwork, through the husks of cars, and still we shot up like miraculous gymnosperms to various kinds of fame. Something in that dreadful water, maybe. The mercury content, we joked. Helped us rise. I don’t know. Only that there was a high concentration – what could be considered a disproportionate tendency – towards brilliance, at bewildering odds with circumstance and resource. …

‘Roli is our brightest, our Dog Star. Those junkyard bricolages he just gave away in the ’90s appreciated sufficiently to pay our rents and student loans as the century rolled over and his name caught the light.’

And another quote for good measure …

‘Her name is Pearl but I first hear it, in Roli’s introduction, as Pearlmeat – Pearlmeat Alex – and this is the name she keeps, at least in my thoughts, because this is her scent as I come to know it: a mild, mineral-aquatic sweetness, resting right in the middle of the palate. Pleasant for now, delectable even, but one wouldn’t hazard to leave her in the sun too long, lest she spoil. An agreeable climate then, this. A midsummer day barely grazing 20°C.’

‘Ghosts and Empties’ by Lauren Groff

The Guardian review nailed it when it said Lauren Groff’s latest story collection Florida is a portrait not so much of a place as of a particular kind of feeling about a place, as experienced by a series of characters, some of whom seem to be the same woman who is furious beyond measure.

‘I have somehow become a woman who yells,’ says the woman in ‘Ghosts and Empties’ the first story in the collection. And why wouldn’t she scream given ‘the disaster of the world, the glaciers dying like living creatures, the great Pacific trash gyre, the hundreds of unrecorded deaths of species, millennia snuffed out as if they were not precious’? The woman also has sons, and feels the immense pressure of being a mother, wife and woman in a sexist society. She sees other mothers ‘in glimpses, bent like shepherdess crooks, scanning the floor for tiny Legos or half-chewed grapes or the people they once were slumped in the corners’.

‘Yport’ is the collection’s final story. It is set in France, where the woman has taken her children to escape the Florida summer which she describes as ‘a slow hot drowning’. As Groff drives home the climate emergency, it is sobering.

‘She can’t stop the thought that children born now will be the last generation of humans. Her sons have known only luck so far, though suffering will surely come for them. She feels it nearing. The midnight of humanity. Their world is so full of beauty, the last terrible flash of beauty before the long darkness.

‘Refusing the pleasure of a dusk like tonight’s with its cool wind, its sunset, its ocean carousel, its ice cream, strikes her profoundly as immoral.’

‘Espalier’ by Kerry Greer

‘On the morning of September 8, 2017, my husband Gabriel ended his own life by multiple means after a long struggle with chronic headaches. He was 32, and I was 29.’ So begins the Preface to Kerry Greer’s debut poetry collection, The Sea Chest.

I knew about Greer’s terrible loss when I read her short story ‘Espalier’ in which the shadow of past love and ruptured relationships seeps into the life of a widow and solo parent who is pursued by a man who is secretive about his separation from his wife and children. Greer writes beautifully and with great acuity and power – and I was glad to see that ‘Espalier’ was shortlisted for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in 2024. Here are a few of my favourite lines:

‘I don’t know who I miss when you fail to call: you, or the one I loved before. Every absence seems tied by rope, hand-over-hand, to that first loss.’

‘I’m thinking of grief, the weight of longing for a person I will never reach, bent double around a memory like a hook.’

‘It might be the only thing we really share, much greater than our love: this urge to build a life across a gap, to carve a home around the silhouette of the past, vast and unknowable.’

‘The Pole’ by J. M. Coetzee

Love, destiny and philosophy are at the heart of J. M. Coetzee’s recent book The Pole and Other Stories. Four of the stories feature Elizabeth Costello, who was the subject of a Coetzee novel called Elizabeth Costello published in 2003. The first piece in the collection is a novella called ‘The Pole’ in which Witold, a 72-year-old Polish pianist and noted but retiring Chopin interpreter, persists with a courtship of sorts with the intrigued but somewhat resistant Beatriz who is a local music devotee.

Two questions intrigue:

‘Where do they come from, the tall Polish pianist and the elegant woman with the gliding walk, the banker’s wife who occupies her days in good works? All year they have been knocking at the door, wanting to be let in or else dismissed and laid to rest. Now, at last, has their time come?’

‘At what moment did she, Beatriz, the woman whose job it was to take the visiting soloist out to dinner that fatal evening in 2015, become his destined one? What was it about her that brought about her election? Where was the divine in her, that evening? And where is the divine in her now?’

PS: While ‘The Pole’ may well qualify to be called a novella, I’m treating it as a long short story for the purposes of this post. If you don’t agree with its inclusion here, take a look at one of the Elizabeth Costello stories, ‘The Glass Abattoir’, ‘The Old Woman and the Cats’, ‘Hope’, ‘As a Woman Grows Older’ – they broach ageing and end of life issues, and all are excellent of course.

‘Lucy (1950)’  by Fiona McFarlane

Highway 13 revolves tangentially around serial killing in its 12 short stories. However, there’s little to no gore or police work featured because it’s not the murders or murderer that Fiona McFarlane is most interested in but rather the ripple effect of the murderer’s brutality. How one man’s actions can intersect with the lives of ordinary people in little and large ways and, in some cases, profoundly change their life trajectories. The book also explores people’s fascination with true crime and, particularly, the crimes of one of Australia’s most notorious criminals. In Highway 13, McFarlane names her fictional killer – who kidnaps backpackers and other travellers, kills them, and then takes them into the Barrow State Forest to dispose of their bodies – Paul Biga.

Lucy (1950)’ is the last story in the collection, and it is poised and profound. It works backwards, so that by the end of it we know the exact moment Paul Biga’s mother-to-be decides to leave the family home with Paul’s father-to-be and the wheel of fate for everyone in the book (including all of the people killed by Biga) is set in motion and can’t be stopped.

‘Lucy feels a hilarious pleasure in having given herself up, just this once, to chance; it might be the only accident of her narrow, decided life. Later, however, she’ll come to think of her whole life as an exercise in chance, and she the victim of many accidents: the accident of those parents, of that uncle, of those brothers, of that husband and that son.’

‘Anne of Cleaves’ by Brandon Taylor

Brandon Taylor wrote the first draft of ‘Anne of Cleaves’ in two hours. ‘It really came all on one wave,’ he told The Rumpus. ‘The whole thing just descended into my mind totally intact.’ ‘Anne of Cleaves’ is a love story. It is also funny, whimsical, insightful and telling, and it’s from Taylor’s first collection of short stories Filthy Animals.

As Marta takes the first tentative steps with her newfound sexuality, and finding her feet with her lover Sigrid, we see her encountering space to be ‘her own person in her own way’, ‘crying the moment Sigrid kissed her’ and dealing with her ex-partner Peter’s homophobia. On the flipside, a certain look Sigrid gives Marta makes her angry because she feels she is being treated ‘like some kind of unwashed beast that needed a long leash and a slow walk’.

Here are a couple more quotes …

‘It was the most beautiful place. The most beautiful time. On their last night, they laid outside on a flannel blanket and watched the slow progression of the stars, the smooth carapace of the sky like glass.’

‘They just couldn’t get enough traction on their desire because every time it felt like they were cresting into the white-hot oblivion of orgasm, sadness drenched them. Sadness at leaving. Sadness at going back to their lives. The sadness of knowing that it would never again be this perfect and this easy.’

‘Velvet Waters’ by Gerald Murnane

I can’t fathom why Gerald Murnane has not won the Nobel Prize for Literature (shortlisted, but not receiving the award, again in 2024). ‘Velvet Waters’ (from Murnane’s Collected Short Fiction) is a fine example of his brilliance. It is an achingly melancholy story featuring a self-contained man who tells of various situations he is in or has been in and how he has been able or unable to find his way in those situations, in the face of a kind of shyness, and fearfulness around women. He also has a clear sense at times that other people can see into his thoughts and that these thoughts are not meant to be seen by anyone else’s eyes. The grassy plains of Victoria and certain images clipped from the narrator’s life and cultural experiences are central to how the man thinks and lives. They’re also pivotal to readers understanding his ‘personality’ / the kind of man he is, and what he’s been through as he’s aged. As always with Murnane, the story is ‘about’ much more than this, layer upon layer and incidents intersecting, which makes the story intriguing to read but quite difficult to explain.

‘During the years from 1965 to 1987 the man who went to picture theatres only once in every two or three years had sometimes noticed in his mind an image from one or another film that he had watched many years earlier. If the image had been from an American film, the man had not looked at the image. The man had wanted only images from Swedish films to appear in his mind. The man had believed that images from American films would cause him to try to behave as though he had been alone with many girls and young women and women during his lifetime. The man wanted to behave as though he had sometimes walked between trees and had sometimes sat beside a stream or lake with the young woman that he had fallen in love with.’

Bonus: A friend of mine, who is also a Gerald Murnane devotee, wrote a lovely poem called ‘behind a grey felt hat’ inspired by ‘Velvet Waters’. Enjoy.

The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Extinct Animals by Sami Bayly can help us plug some of these knowledge gaps. More importantly, it reminds us we need to care for nature and its delicate ecosystems before it’s too late. Before they collapse.

‘Today, the rate at which species are becoming extinct is thought to be 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate,’ Bayly writes in the encyclopaedia’s introduction. ‘Hunting, overfishing, habitat destruction, pollution, climate change and the introduction of invasive species are all modern causes of extinction. If we aren’t careful, the sixth mass extinction event could be a result of human choices and actions.’

It’s sobering stuff – and particularly for children.

Happily, though, while Bayly is candid about the realities of extinction she also makes learning about the 60 extinct or near-extinct creatures in the encyclopaedia both interesting and fun.

For each of these amazing creatures there is a double page spread, one page for the illustration and the other page for information about the animal’s extinction status, location/habitat and diet, as well as a box containing fun facts.

Did you know, for example, that the giant millipede (arthropleura) weighed 50 kilograms and grew to approximately the length of a car? Or that the giant ground sloth (megatherium americanum) was the largest bipedal mammal to have ever lived, and that they were even bigger than modern rhinos and elephants?

Were you aware that the Sunda pangolin (manis javanica), like all pangolins, is thought to have been able to feast on over 70 million ants or terminates in just one year, using their 25-centimetre-long sticky tongues to slurp them up. Or that western black rhinos (diceros bicornis longipes) probably communicated, like modern day rhinos do, through their urine, conveying important information through the scent of their pee? Amazingly, a single spray of rhino urine can reach distances of 4 metres! What!

Bayli’s marvellous illustration of the pugnacious wedge-seal (gomphotaria pubnax) shows a frightening set of tusks, and her portrait of the helicoprion shark (helicoprion) offers an eerie close-up of their spiral jaws (called ‘tooth whorls’). In fact, all the illustrations are really well done.

I was intrigued but also somewhat overwhelmed by the Australian-based species that have become or are nearly extinct. This includes the Kangaroo Island assassin spider (zephyrarchaea austini) thought to have been made extinct after a major bushfire on Kangaroo Island at the end of 2019 and start of 2020. Two spiders were discovered in some leaf litter in 2021, which means they’re not extinct but critically endangered.

Then there’s the southern corroboree frog (pseudophryne corroboree) of which there are only around 300 left in the wild in Kosciuszko National Park in New South Wales. Also, there’s Hackett’s giant echidna (murrayglossus hacketti), which went extinct around 40,000 years ago, and may have been an occasional food source for early humans.

Fossil evidence places the Quinkana (Quinkana) – one of the last terrestrial crocodiles, and one of the largest Australian predators to have ever lived – in Bluff Downs, a fossil site approximately 1,150 kilometres northwest of Brisbane.

Along with the species I’ve mentioned so far, Bayli includes many more sea creatures, snakes, geckos, rats, orangutans and other animals from across the world for us and our young ones to study and consider. She also gives pronunciation guidance for the scientific names, which is helpful.

I love this encyclopaedia. It’s a rare bird in terms of how beautifully and carefully it’s been put together. A great gift for children aged 8+ … and, you know, Christmas is coming.

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The Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Extinct Animals

Sami Bayly

Hachette HB $32.99

Imprint: Lothian Children’s Books