Reading from the right place A conversation between Lara Moreno and Kattie Whittemore Originally released in Spanish as Piel de lobo, Wolfskin was published by last year by Structo Press. Here, the novel’s author Lara Moreno and its translator Katie Whittemore discuss writing, translation, and how Wolfskin came to be. Katie Whittemore: Congratulations, Lara. Wolfskin is out in English. The culmination of our first meeting in Teruel in 2018. Full circle. Lara Moreno: We’ve told that story before and we’ll tell it again. Go ahead and tell it; it was so funny. KW: Well, let’s see, we first met ..read more

Jack Young LBD September showers. Static storms. Listening to Grace Jones’ ‘Walking in the Rain’. Doing what I’m doing, feeling out of place. Walking out of the rain, into charity shop shelter. Hair soaked, newly bleached blonde, exploding from the storm. My thin jacket is satin-slide as the warm air wafts in from outside. I am sheltering near the dress aisle. Feeling out of place. Waiting for a woman to move on. Waiting to tip-toe hush hush across the invisible line between over-sized grandad shirts HERE, and satin grace THERE. The woman, bleached blonde like me, slowly steps away. I creep ..read more

Dylan Brennan Kingfisher Haibun My kingfisher died. I couldn’t bear to see him rot. So, I followed the wisdom of the day and kept him dry, placed him in a box. I stuffed the box into my wardrobe. It sat there for years behind grey banks of old jeans with turned-up hems where dust, soil, shards of twigs accumulated. You see, if you keep the corpse of a kingfisher in a dry condition it will never decay. If placed in a wardrobe among garments the halcyon bird will ward off moths and preserve your clothes with its pleasant odour. I thought often of adorning his resting place with hydrangea petal ..read more

Alex Aspden VVaterloo Mint Street, SE1. The sound of the bells every morning. Tiny bells. Barely perceptible. Each rung by a withered hand. An orchestra of slow tinkles. The sound echoing the hands that ring them. Aged and ponderous. All except Mrs Blanker. She can really belt on hers. The proprietor once told me that she had seen action in some overseas emergency. I can believe it. She has the look of someone who once subjugated local populations. She punched me in the gut last week. I withdrew with a bow, saying nothing, deferring to her extreme old age, as instructed during my brief traini ..read more

Ben Tufnell Holes I My father liked to call himself an Apiarist, which I think tells you a lot about him. He would puff with pride when asked and carefully explain: it is a person who works with and cares for honeybees. Ahh, the questioner might say, you mean a Beekeeper? He would nod sagely. Yes, an Apiarist. And my mother would roll her eyes. Of course, he was not an Apiarist by trade; it was a hobby. Nonetheless, it was his consuming passion. Every day, when he came home from the office, he would go straight out into the garden to check his hives, sometimes without even saying a word to h ..read more

David Gerow’s wonderfully strange ‘Story for Circular Breathers’ opens our latest issue. If you haven’t already, you can read it here. We caught up with Dave for a quick chat about the piece and his writing more generally. Can you tell us a little about the genesis of ‘Story for Circular Breathers’? I actually had this idea long before Covid. It was to be set in the US during the Great Depression, when endurance competitions like this weren’t unheard of (as depicted in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?). But for whatever reason, the idea fell by the wayside until 2020. I finally wrote the story d ..read more

Ian Critchley Upper Kutz Christmas Eve at Upper Kutz and we’ve got the tree in the window with all the lights and baubles. There’s tinsel around the mirrors and a mix of Christmas tunes on shuffle. We’ve already heard Wham! three times. The punters have been coming in a steady stream for their fades, comb-overs and quiffs, or just the good old short back and sides, a last-minute dash to look presentable for the big day. We’ve been at it since eight, me and the boss, Trent, and my fingers and feet are killing me and there’s hours still to go. ‘You see that fight last week?’ Trent says to the g ..read more

Mark Russell Ghost Gear The town’s beach cleaning society meet every Sunday morning at 11.35am. Emma finds this a great relief because though she is passionate about picking up rubbish, she also likes to party. It means she picks up less than the others, but every bit helps, as Donna likes to say. Emma had been a member for six weeks when she decided she knew Donna well enough to ask why the time was so precise. ‘The church service ends at 11 o’clock. That gives Councillor and Mrs Meadows the chance to have a cup of tea and make their way here.’ Emma’s bag of marine debris was heavier than u ..read more

Joseph Hardy Receiving Wisdom I predict, when you’re in second grade, a wise third-grader will share that it’s true: “If you step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back.”  She’ll tell you lurid stories about real people, two different families known by her cousin in another town, to whom it happened.  And that day, on the half-mile walk from school, you’ll try to miss them all and fail.  You’ll race the rest of the way home shaken, afraid of what you’ll find, and learn  what you do, or fail to do, will not affect her, that day no different than another. Joseph Hard ..read more

Lucy Peters Don’t go, Jason Waterfalls Since the break-up I hadn’t started spending any more time with my friends, or my parents, or going on dates; instead I got up early on Saturday mornings and went across town to the British Library to drink rocket-fuel coffee and translate obscure texts out of ancient Greek. That morning I had called up from the stacks a shabby edition of somebody’s collected writings that looked like it probably hadn’t been opened since the 1950s, and paged through it more or less at random, because the point wasn’t really to get into the spicy detail of political machi ..read more