Watch Jane Fraser (Guest Fiction Editor of Issue Thirteen) read from the title story of her short story collection, Connective Tissue. You can purchase Issue Thirteen here and Connective Tissue here.
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From 2022
Dreams and Realities / Angela Graham
Angela Graham introduces her trio of poems The Magi Remember by reflecting on the link between dreams, imagination and action. In the Christmas Nativity story, the Three Kings, far from being wise men, display astonishing political naivety. They congratulate Herod, the local supremo, on the arrival of a superpower and expect him to be thrilled…
The Magi Remember / Angela Graham
Three poems for the season by Angela Graham: ‘Balthazar’, ‘Melchior’ and ‘Caspar’. Balthazar When the roads turned into streets and the streets to lanes and the lanes to alleys I became suspicious. I suspected … … something we had not prepared for. Our retinue had fallen more and more behind as…
Winter Readings: Raine Geoghegan
Raine Geoghegan reads her two poems from Issue Thirteen . ‘The Man I Thought was Welsh’ ‘My Father’s House’ Raine Geoghegan, M.A. is a Welsh born poet, prose writer and playwright of Romany descent. She is a Forward Prize, twice Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net nominee. Her work has been published online and…
Books of the Year 2022 / Part Four
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd choose the books they have most enjoyed this year. Jo Mazelis It seems I am always catching up with myself, so the books I read are often lagging behind the times. For example, in 2022 I finally read The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark perhaps it was, by then, too late…
Books of the Year 2022 / Part Three
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd choose the books they have most enjoyed this year. Part Four follows tomorrow. John Lavin In Ruth, the central character in Loved and Missed, Susie Boyt has created a multi-faceted portrait to rival the work of one of her literary heroes, Henry James. If the novel’s early pages are notable…
Winter Readings: ‘Human Soup’ by Madeleine D’Arcy
Madeleine D’Arcy reads from ‘Human Soup’, her short story in Issue Thirteen. Madeleine D’Arcy’s début short story collection, Waiting For The Bullet (Doire Press, 2014), won the Edge Hill Readers’ Choice Prize 2015 (UK). In 2010 she received the Hennessy Literary Award for First Fiction and the overall Hennessy Literary Award for New Irish Writer.…
Winter Readings: Two Triolets by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch reads her two triolets from Issue Thirteen of The Lonely Crowd.
Winter Readings / ‘Philanthropy’ by Glyn Edwards, Jon Fowlds and Dan Trevithick
A film-poem based on a piece from Vertebrae, published by the Lonely Press.
Music by Jon Fowlds and Dan Trevithick.
Books of the Year 2022 / Part Two
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd choose the books they have most enjoyed this year. Part Three follows later this week. Livi Michael Manchester Uncanny is the fifth collection of short stories from master craftsman Nicholas Royle. As suggested by the title, all the stories are set in Manchester, although it is a Manchester made…
Books of the Year 2022 / Part One
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd choose the books they have most enjoyed this year. Part Two follows next week.
On writing ‘Exquisite Prisons’ & other poems – Edward O’Dwyer
I look every day at Irish behaviour, listen to Irish talk, and as predictable as it is most of the time, when I examine a lot of it, and I do, it seems so ludicrous to me a lot of the time. Predictable behaviour shouldn’t seem so frequently bizarre, and yet it does, and that was the seed the poem germinated from. The idea of leaving is questioned. The belief that this is freedom is questioned. The idea that the best prisons are the ones we don’t ever know we’re in is there in the poem. I could go on and on here but won’t. It’s in the poems. Have you read them yet?
Setting out my stall / Jane Fraser
After reading each story once from beginning to end, I collated a list of sixty ‘maybes’. These were stories that would be read time and time again, though even at the early stages, there were some works that lingered long in the mind. Stories that would not go away. Even now, I have one particular story that rises to the fore, when I think of the whole batch I received. Whether readers would agree, I don’t know. That again, is the nature of this role, and the luxury of subjectivity. At this point, I had to become ruthless in terms of a writer’s control of the form, and also address how the fourteen stories would sit together as an anthology. I had to reject some stories, that although were good and would have otherwise made the cut, were too similar in theme with others that I deemed ‘better’.
How I wrote ‘The Janitor is Crying in the Gents’’ / Natalie Ann Holborow
‘The Janitor is Crying in the Gents’’ emerged from long hours sitting in hospital waiting rooms and car parks, quietly observing life around me, largely ignoring the stack of dates magazines at my side. There are the amazing staff we see on the TV every day – the nurses and doctors, eyes crinkling into a…