Short story writers often say that, for maximum dramatic effect, you should arrive fashionably late to a scene. After years of living in the literary wilderness, it seems the short story's own moment has finally arrived. The last twelve months have m...

From modest beginnings in 1988, when it was a listings newsletter, "Poetry London" has developed into one of the UK's leading poetry magazines. Do not be mislead by its name: "Poetry London" has the same relation to London as "The New Yorker" has to...

Computers are changing. Soon the silicon chip will seem like a clunky antique amid the bounty of more exotic processes on offer. Robots are changing too; material evolution and swarm intelligence are creating a new generation of devices that will div...

Under the Israeli occupation of the '70s and '80s, writers in Gaza had to go to considerable lengths to ever have a chance of seeing their work in print. Manuscripts were written out longhand, invariably under pseudonyms, and smuggled out of the Stri...

Edgar Allan Poe once claimed the greatest literary works were those that could be read "in one sitting". "Brevity must be in direct ratio of the intensity of the intended effect", he argued, once the effect has been established, of course. The stori...

Programmable memories, fatherless reproduction, nano-tech implants, amphibian-powered scar treatment, full body modification, brain-scanning lie-detectors, inter-species reproduction, self-determining synthetic "green goo"... Which of these would yo...

"In Between Two Windows", his first book of poems, Oli Hazzard takes language out to stretch and flex and bend itself into new shapes. Into the formal straits of sestinas, sonnets and pantoums stray palindromes, mirrored poems, anagrams, allusions an...

"Bevel" is William Letford's first book, but his poems have already earned him a large following thanks to his brilliant performances and through Carcanet's "New Poetries V" anthology. Letford makes poems from the rhythms of speech and the stuff of d...

"Borrowed Landscapes", Peter Scupham's first book since his acclaimed Collected Poems of 2002, explores a hinterland of enchantment and nightmare, a landscape whose contours reach back to Shakespeare's England by way of two world wars and a coming of...

"The Baboons of Hada" introduces thirty years of Eric Ormsby's precise and generous poetry. Opening with an exuberant bestiary of spiders and starfish, penguins, snakes and contemplative baboons, the collection moves on to explore a world of intricat...