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Which words won’t be OK in the future? And what will be the legacy of the work we do today? Rie Qudan poses these questions in her novel Sympathy Tower Tokyo, which came out in English this year, translated by Jesse Kirkwood. It made international headlines because Qudan shared that 5% of the novel was
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If you’ve ever worked in comms or HR or any of those weird, hard-to-define office jobs with a made-up title, then you might like Ben Pester’s novel The Expansion Project, which came out last month. As well as a workplace satire, it’s also a surreal drama about love, loss and memory – but it’s probably
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Bruce Springsteen is in the news – there’s a biopic coming out – and I’ve been thinking about HIV and AIDS. I remember a woman with HIV who gave a talk at my school. She was a Springsteen fan and told us she’d seen him in concert many times, had kissed him once on stage.
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In the Afterword to Henry Gee’s recently published The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire, Gee thanks his agent for “suggesting that such a depressing topic really ought to have a Hollywood ending”. The “depressing topic” he writes about is mankind’s extinction. Most of the book covers arguments for this outcome to our story.
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“I’ve done the serious bit, so now it’s just enjoy.” So spoke artist Stormzy in his 2023 interview with Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff for The Guardian. The “serious bit” he’s talking about includes his political activism and good works in general, on top of his music. He has funded a scholarship at the University of Cambridge, started
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The Aesthetica Creative Writing Anthology 2025 is out now in print and digital (link here), and included inside is my award-shortlisted story, ‘Now’. I started writing fiction as a career about a year ago. I left the corporate world and got a job at a pub, where I remain. When I’m not there, I’m writing.
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There was news this month about Canterbury University axing English literature degrees from 2025. According to the BBC, Canterbury said that it “…constantly evaluated the subjects it offered to ensure it was able to meet the needs of future students and employers.” The mention of employers is interesting. I learned this month as well that
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“And I feel bad for Ahab as well, because he thinks that his life will be better if he can just kill this whale, but in reality it won’t help him at all.” That’s a line in Aronofsky’s film The Whale (adapted from Samuel D. Hunter’s play of the same name). Specifically, it’s from a
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I think most people, given the choice, would prefer to have their lives celebrated, rather than tolerated. “The way you live is fantastic” sounds more validating than “I respect your right to exist”, though I’m happy enough with the latter. Perhaps I have low expectations of others. There’s a minor episode in British politics relating
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My earliest memory of lying is from when I was five and it’s an example of ‘lying by omission’. As a child I enjoyed hiding, seeing how long I could stay hidden before boredom set in (normally a few minutes) or people started looking for me. On the day in question, I’d arrived home from
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Harry Dobbs 