The Lonely Crowd will feature a new short story by a different author each month throughout the remainder of 2025. For July, we are delighted to publish a new work by Tadgh Muller. And the dog started barking, charging around like she might rip down a curtain or knock over the table. My missus went…
The Lonely Crowd will feature a new short story by a different author each month throughout the remainder of 2025. For June, we are delighted to publish a new work by Aideen Henry.
‘Mature People’ comes from my recently published collection of short stories, Twenty-Twenty Vision. It could well have been the title of the entire collection since the overarching theme is the experience of late middle-age reckoning; the backward glance on life, love and the whole damned thing.
Some of the action of ‘Mature People’ takes place in Trinity College Dublin – so there’s also a sly echo of Sally Rooney’s Normal People in the title. However, this is Normal People for oldies.
‘Take Away’ is about a Hannah, a fifteen-year-old struggling with ME in small town Sussex in 1990. It’s a personal story, as I was ill with ME in my mid-twenties during the same period. Hannah suffers disbelief and hostility about her illness, sometimes from classmates, but mostly from some care professionals, doctors and social workers.
Lucie McKnight Hardy (she/her) is the author of the novel Water Shall Refuse Them (2019) and a collection of short stories, Dead Relatives (2021), of which the Guardian said, ‘This short story collection confirms the author’s reputation in the field of literary horror.’ Her stories have featured in various publications in addition to The Lonely Crowd, including Best British Short Stories 2019, Uncertainties IV, The New Abject, Black Static and as a limited edition chapbook from Nightjar Press.
Her next novel, Night Babies, will be published by John Murray in Spring 2026.
Gavin Goodwin reads his short story, ‘The Fox’, accompanied by Nerys Clark on cello. The Lonely Crowd · ‘The Fox’ by Gavin Goodwin Gavin Goodwin lectures in English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. His most recent publication is Creativity and Anxiety: Making, Meaning, Experience (Palgrave, 2023). ‘The Fox’ was written and performed by Gavin…
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd pick their favourite books of 2024. John Lavin The Letters of Seamus Heaney (edited by Christopher Reid) is surely an important book, giving the reader a more unfettered insight into the mind of the great poet than the equally essential Stepping Stones (Heaney’s autobiography-by-interview with Dennis O’Driscoll). Immediately the lapsed Heaney…
Karl Lorentz Ellerstraße 174 40227 Düsseldorf Annette Shröder Industriemuseum Cuxhavener Straße 9 40221 Düsseldorf Oberbilk, den 2. Oktober 1997 Dear Annette and the management team, I thought you would like to know that I have now come to terms with my unfair dismissal from the Industriemuseum. I’m no longer angry…
At thirteen, David was proud of his vocabulary. He knew what ‘solipsism’ meant, and he was a ‘solipsist’, although he preferred to think of himself as an ‘egomaniac’, it sounded cooler; and, being a solipsistic egomaniac, he suspected that everything he’d ever experienced was created by his subconscious and only he was real.
One month after she graduated college, Leah and her mother took a vacation to Maine. Originally, Leah had intended to go backpacking across the country with her boyfriend, who she had been dating since freshman year, and who she later married, then divorced
I climb the stile and drop into the field, feet sending a dust cloud into the air. It films my eyes and I blink it away as best I can. The sheep are bloated yellow dots under the crumbling boundary wall, awake but still, conserving energy before their move to the next patch of shade.…
…slap at thrip and thunderbug, midge & mosquito come whining from the dark at neck and wrist, ancient blood knowledge voiced by this time & in this place long before the winking out of every point of light & too the ones unseeable, inaudible, stars so far that they are yet to be even seen here so young is the planet in relation, how it will go with the one to whom you are wed Mary well ask the biting bloodbugs, ask the twirling phantoms hereabouts & implore the leaves & the shine on them & if you must grieve at this point before death then
The party is in the morning. I arrive early at the venue, ensure it’s clean, the bathroom stocked with toilet paper. I arrange the tables, decorate the cake with a wicked witch flying on her broom, black cat as passenger. I blow up the balloons – helium is not allowed, not to disturb the fire…
The issue, I realised one morning in the supermarket, holding my little list of necessities, was that I couldn’t take my own life. I was wheeling the trolley about, dropping things into it from my brief list, when I came to a stop on the cold meats aisle. There, laid out in cuts and slices and sausages, was pig, every shape and flavour of it, in discs and dice, smoked and cured, all ultra-illuminated by the fluorescent light; like laminated bruising. And somewhere out of view there was a person, with a job and a smock dedicated to this.