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The Reader 43

POETRY from Ian McMillan, Martin Malone, Rebecca Gethin, David Cooke, and Stuart Henson. Gwyneth Lewis is this issue’s Poet on Her Work.

FICTION

Two extracts from Steve Sem-Sandberg’s mortifyingly powerful Emperor of Lies (Faber, July 2011); David Almond’s ‘The Book of Beasts’ taken from The True Tale of Monster Billy Dean (Viking, September 2011); a new short story from David Constantine.

THOUGHT PIECES

Andrew Crompton writing and drawing on almost anything and everything, and Alan Wall offering an occasional series on the way that words’ meanings or forms change over time. And we welcome back and old friend, Kenneth Steven, who writes of the mountains.

Plus all your regular features.

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1 Year Subscription - United Kingdom

Your subscription brings you four copies of The Reader direct to your front door and saves you over 15% on the cover price.

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Issue 40 - Reaching Forty

Issue 40 – Reaching Forty

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Issue 40 - Reaching Forty


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Issue 39 - From Dog to God: The Everything Issue

Issue 39 – From Dog to God: The Everything Issue

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Featured inside:

* An interview with Sonja Sohn – star of the acclaimed television drama The Wire and co-founder of the Baltimore charity Rewired for Change

* Clare Allan – author of Poppy Shakespeare – investigates the genetic make-up of her dog, Meg

* Fiction by Salley Vickers and Stanley Middleton

* Poetry from David Constantine and Angela Leighton

* and we couldn’t have everything without all the fantastic features and competitions you’d expect from your quarterly dose of Reader goodness.


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Issue 37 - Knowing by Heart

Issue 37 – Knowing by Heart

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Featured inside:

* In ‘Memoir’, David Constantine writes movingly about his father’s depression and his uncertain utterances:

Before he died I often felt I should want to speak for him; now it would be truer to say I want to reassure him… I used to want to hide my eyes in love and pity from the spectacle of such an openness to wounding… Here was a man trying something out, often nothing very much, with all the confidence he could muster; often not much. Therein their force to trouble and move me lay.

* Richard Gwyn provides a bewildering vivid account of his experience of hepatic encephalopathy, or as he calls it ‘brain fog’, describing the puzzlement of being at the centre of a neurological disease, inwardly stuck and aware of losses that awareness cannot restore.

* Poet on His Work: Michael Schmidt (author of the brilliantly useful Lives of the English Poets and editor of PN Review) writes on his poem, ‘Also, Poor Yorick’.

* New poetry by Neil Curry, Patrick McGuinness, Alison Brackenbury and Julie-ann Rowell.

* Hanif Kureishi writes on the relationship of the teacher of creative writing to the students in their struggle to realise their subject matter.

* David Almond (author of Skellig and the 2009 Liverpool Reads book The Savage) talks to Jane Davis about his schooldays and his relationship to books, writing and religion.


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Issue 36 - Emotional Surges

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* New poetry by John Kinsella and Michael Parker

* New fiction by Vanessa Hemingway, a writer with a very famous grandfather, and a great voice of her own

* Seamus Heaney’s prose poem about Thomas Hardy

* Peter Robinson writes on his poem, ‘Otterspool Prom’, the latest in the series Poet on His Work

* Essays by Angela Patmore on why stress is good for you, and Hans van der Heijden, the architect behind the fabulous redesign of Liverpool’s Bluecoat, on Wittgenstein

* Eric Lomax (The Railway Man) talks to Angela Macmillan

* Blake Morrison, Philip Davis and Josie Billington discuss the importance of reading in groups, the latest contribution to The Reading Revolution series

And much more inside!

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Issue 35 - Starting the Reading Revolution

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* New poetry by Les Murray, Connie Bensley and Tom Paulin; and John Greening writes the latest in our ‘Poet on His Work’ series

* New fiction by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Richard Flanagan

* Essays by Catherine Pickstock on Tracey Emin, and Paul Kingsnorth of the Dark Mountain Project on the myths and stories that threaten our world

* The Reader Gets Angry a searing indictment of teacher-training in this country from Gabriella Gruder-Poni

* Interview with Liverpool composer Kenneth Hesketh

* Recommendations from Adam Phillips and Frank Cottrell Boyce


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Issue 34 - Literature in the Raw

In issue 34 there is Simon Barnes, the great sports writer for The Times, exploring the kindred stuff of sport and literature:

Sport is not news: it is literature in the raw.

It’s a packed issue, revealing the raw material (that is, the individual) behind finished works of literature.

There’s new poetry from:

Jacob Polley is the latest Poet on His Work, writing about his haunting poem, ‘The Owls’ in a piece called ‘Fistfuls of Fresh Clay’.

This summer (August 6th) would have been Tennyson’s 200th birthday, so look out for celebrations and fresh thinking on the nineteenth-century poet. Plus we launch our series on Get Into Reading: the Reading Revolution.

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Issue 12

With new fiction from Wilbur Sanders, Last Wish

Jonathan Bate explores the relationship between brain and creativity

Reviews of Coleridge and Oliver Sacks

Recommendations, Reading Lives, and New Poetry

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Issue 11

New poetry from Les Murray, Pamela Coren, Mairi McInnes, and Ian Parks

Lucas Dawson, The Oar

Ralph Goldswain, Graffiti for the Soul

Alan Davis, Two Books and a Picture: a reader’s reading of a picture

Meet the Reader: The Importance of Books in My Life


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Issue 10

Poetry from Neil Curry, Juned Subhan, and Tom Paulin

Gloria Moreno-Castillo, Reading R.S. Thomas

Brian Nellist, The Function of Conversation in Othello

Philip Davis, The Place of the Implicit

Alan Gould, Consolation and the Novel

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Issue 9 - Is Reading Good For You?

Poetry from Mark Haddon, Giovanni Malito and Alan Gould

Felicity Rosslyn, Reading and Mental Health

David Constantine, In Another Country

Bel Mooney, The Herdsman’s Wife

Dr Bruce Charlton, Icelandic Journal

Jenny Hartley, Reading in Groups

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Issue 7

Doris Lessing, Green Glass Beads

Stanley Middleton, Wages of Virtue

Poetry from U.A. Fanthorpe and Les Murray

Clive Wilmer, Ruskin, Morris and Medievalism


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Issue 6

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Bel Mooney, Beowulf - A Reassesment

Poetry from Alan Davis and Dave Gould

Jane Davis talks to Michael Schmidt

Raymond Tallis, Not True Vertigo

Ralph Pite, Dante - Some Ways of Starting


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