Excerpt from The European Eel
Steve Ely

20 degrees north, 62 west. The outer rise of the Puerto Rico Trench, a hundred miles north of Anguilla. New Moon, 1% visible. Kraken darkness, lit only by octopus phosphorescence and the bright detonations of ejaculating eels. They’ve been travelling in tandem for five days now, through frittering flames of fertilised ova and the disarticulate, […]

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Steve Ely

Barn Owls in Suffolk
Seán Hewitt

I watch them for a long while, the pair rising and courting the field in daylight, the strange geometry of their faces funneling the air,   and everything – their whiteness, their sense of having slipped through from another world, their focus on the hunt –   in the end it all comes down to […]

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Seán Hewitt

Dandelions on the Common
Craig Smith

  There are new dandelions on the Common. The spindly stalks of these coin-sized supernova can barely lift their heads from the ground, today being November and the season for dandelions long being over. One weekend, three years back, the boy and I questioned how the solar rays of dandelion petals switched modes to become […]

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Craig Smith

Shades of Emergency
Daisy Hildyard

  What does emergency feel like? If you’re in Henan, China, perhaps you felt a goldfish nibbling your foot as you waded along the pavement during the summer floods. If you’re in Madrid or Chennai or Sydney, maybe it was stifling heat, the smell of rotting trash, dead insects crisping on the windowsill. If you’re […]

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Daisy Hildyard

Q&A with Margaret Atwood
Toby Litt

  This interview took place on Thursday 24th March 2022. The wonderful Margaret Atwood was in London for an event at the Royal Festival Hall, promoting Burning Questions, her new book of essays and occasional pieces. She spoke with Toby Litt, editor of the Writers Rebel website.   TL: Thank you for talking to us. […]

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Toby Litt

Duino – poem
Patrick Mackie

  Whether you can get there from here or wherever depends on whether you are there already, on whether you will find that you are already standing amidst the outspread hands of its stones, and their misty grey dawns,  on whether indeed the arcs and folds of that sky really can make all location moot […]

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Patrick Mackie

Feral in the Burbs
Sir Simon Schama

Portrait of Sir Simon Schama wearing casual clothes.

  The Hudson Valley suburbs, I am happy to report, remain a savage place.  Two days ago (in the first week of August 2020) we took a direct hit from Tropical Storm Isaias and bosky turned brutal. White oaks and red maples, shag bark hickories and tulip trees bent, broke or uprooted, smashing down on […]

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Sir Simon Schama