Were
We have been taught to believe that werewolves only change into their cursed form on full-moon nights, but perhaps – and this is speculation – on nights without full moons,…
Writing
Asterisk
High electric masts broadcast the turnpike’s hyphenations: Flat, dashed boxy. Their bold yellow glow adumbrating distance, blinking smaller then vanishing. The slow-going traffic signals our taking it for granted, this…
A Hole at the Core
I re-encounter the incised apple indirectly, in the mirror-image. Glancing across rows of burnished half-pint beer glasses, their reflections bounced back and forth on opposing glass surfaces, it is on…
Great and Small Mythologies
Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, released last year in a posthumously published translation by Seamus Heaney, is concerned, amongst other things, with the inadequacies of art. In it, Virgil describes…
Open Call: Wolf Crossing
In Finland there is a line around the city: susiraja, the wolf border. Within is law and order: shopping malls and social security. Beyond the susiraja lie the wilds and…
Being a Beast
Mankind has celebrated a close connection with the animal kingdom since our Stone Age ancestors dressed in furs and painted bison on cave walls. Mythology abounds with tales of creatures…
Little Island Press
Little Island Press is an independent publisher of new and classic poetry, fiction and international literature in translation. Inspired by some of the amateur presses of the 1920s, Andrew Latimer…
A Dys-Praxic Sketchbook
I used to think that the only skill I had was drawing. It was only much later that I realised that it was simply the only skill that I had…
The Future is the Past: Harwich, Essex
Harwich has a split personality. At the northeasternmost point of Essex, the old town is still laid out as the medieval port it once was, but it’s separated from the…
Frankenstein: Before the Beginning
Every thing must have a beginning… and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. It was precisely two hundred years…
Sophia
In 1818, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, newlywed husband of Sophia, Governor-General of Bencoolen, surveyed the island of Singapore, which was made a British colony early the following year. i….