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Issue 40 - Reaching Forty

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.

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.

* 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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* 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

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