Meet Alex Woods. He’s seventeen years old and sitting at the wheel of Mr Peterson’s car at Dover after a hasty round trip to Zurich. A customs controller has just ...
When sixteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd gets off the train in Philadelphia at the opening of Ayana Mathis’s debut, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, she is amazed to find African Americans free ...
We are very excited to announce the beginning of a new monthly column by novelist Ali Shaw exploring landscapes — as they are, and as we perceive them. His first piece ...
In a response to Alan Gillespie’s recent article for Litro on the impact of video games on teenagers’ creative writing, gamer and writer Jordan Erica Webber argues that we should ...
Seventy years ago the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) wrote “The Library of Babel”, a short story about a cosmically vast library that contained all possible books — a ...
So, the notes are back from my editor and I’m embarking on the final (this time I mean it) rewrite of my novel. It’s had its fair share of revisions ...
I’m a serious reader. My addiction is incurable. The walls of my flat are lined with books, so many of them that they have overflowed their shelves and now stand ...
I need to start with a disclaimer: there are a lot of Dicks in this book. There are also lots of long and often obscure words. But while I’m keeping ...
In the second of his monthly columns for Litro, short story writer and secondary school teacher Alan Gillespie discusses the difficult business of getting teenagers to sit down and do ...
It’s an exciting time for African science fiction, marked most recently by the release of StoryTime’s ‘AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers’, a short story collection edited by Zimbabwean writer ...
To mark the 50th anniversary of A Clockwork Orange, Random House have released the novel in a new form – an app. In this review, Wes Brown looks at both ...
When people hear the word ‘festival’ there are many images that may spring to mind: fields of swaying glowsticks shining brightly à la Glastonbury; beer, saurkraut and wurstl flowing freely ...
About a year ago I read Erlend Loe’s novel, Naïve. Super. It was one of those books that came at the perfect moment in my life; a wonderfully poetic, ...
Last month, we challenged successful UK participants of National Novel Writing Month 2012 (also known as NaNoWriMo) to write an article about their battle to write 50,000 words of a ...
Short stories are by their very nature condensed. As Hemingway has so famously said, they reveal only ‘the tip of the iceberg’. ‘Reunion’ by John Cheever is an example of ...
Even before I read F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, I was under its spell. The book exuded magic, from the enchanting eyes floating above a sparkling fairground on the ...
A good occult story doesn’t require the reader to believe in the occult. I can be scared by Algernon Blackwood without believing in ghosts, or get a chill down my ...
Still at a loss for what to read next? The Litro team and some of the country’s best book reviewers give you their picks of 2012. Continue Reading ...
The title of Taiye Selasi’s debut short story is as blunt as it is ironic, proclaiming bold content while quietly mocking Western anthropological theses of old. I first came upon ...
Katy Darby is the author of The Unpierced Heart (originally titled The Whores’ Asylum), a historical novel featuring a home for ‘fallen women’ in 1880s Oxford. Here, she reviews ...
