“A nudity that isn’t an apostolic pendulum/swinging between pleasure and sin.”
[Essay] Painting Anxiety: Berthe Morisot’s ‘Julie Daydreaming’ — Connie Sjödin
“Lit from the viewer’s direction, the painting invents a singular viewpoint and even predicts the camera flash, freezing the image against ‘time’s relentless melt’, as in Susan Sontag’s evocative phrase.”
[Fiction] ‘Tourists’ — Mark Halpern
“At breakfast, Henry thought he should discuss fatherly matters, but didn’t know which or how.”
[Poetry] — R.A. Allen
“I find him a collectable specimen / for my ongoing study / of longing.”
[Fiction] Passing Through — Ronan O’Shea
“Now, sat in the café, I forgot the general rundown feeling that had nagged at me all morning, and I wanted to stay; happy and nostalgic, with Marcus.”
[Review] The Brown Anthology edited by Sofia Amina — Daunish Negargar
“This anthology is refreshing in its boldness and authenticity, particularly at a time when major publishing houses are tripping over themselves to make promises on Twitter to ‘do better’ in highlighting more authors of colour.”
[Fiction] In the wish factory — Joanna Kaye
“The caretaker sees the world through its wishes; he feels the passage of time this way, he hears the people’s pain, he smells the glacial pace of change.”
[Poetry] — Tom Holmes
“This is where Oppenheimer lived / before he ended the war, / where he read the Bhagavad Gita”
[Essay] The Teratologists — Louis Armand
“Post-war nuclear technologies represented the first instance in which direct transformation or even control of the planetary environment came into view as a scientifically achievable proposition.”
[Poetry] ‘Net Curtains’ — DS Maolalai
“this morning is milk / with a thick mist / of souplight”
[Editorial] Solidarity with Black Lives Matter: Links to anti-racist educational resources and how to support and donate to anti-racist causes and organisations
New Critique stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
[Essay] ‘Dominic Cummings must be sacked’: Contemporary Political Engagement and Early Modern Petitions — Ellen Paterson
“Widespread anger over evil counsellors and the exercise of agency via petitioning that dominate contemporary political discourse have fascinating antecedents in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.”
[Poetry] — Simon Robson
“the Boots perfume counter assistant looking / like Dracula’s daughter”
[Essay] The Adviser’s Hubris: Cummings’s Cromwellian Machinations — Josh Mcloughlin
“Following on from Johnson’s turn as the sacrificial lamb, Cummings treads the political boards as contemporary history’s schemer-in-chief, thrasonical and hubristic in the advertisement of his unassailable power.”
[Essay] ‘…And now I am cast as a ghost’: Spectre(s) of India in Midnight’s Children — Seamus McGinley-Hughes
“The text delves into the recesses of primordial memory, cuts up and rearranges history and figures nation as dream; memory, history, and nation inform, antagonise, and haunt each other.”
[Fiction] ‘The Talented Higgs Boson’ — Mary Peelen
“You have to admit that in this way, the Higgs has sort of a sheen of godliness.”
[Fiction] ‘Clarity’ — Mark Halpern
“Among the many words they didn’t use was judōteki-kōgeki—literally, passive-aggressive—which had recently infiltrated the Japanese language via Western theories of psychotherapy. But did Japan need such a word? Maybe that’s just the way people are. Especially as relationships wear on.”
[Essay] Boris the Ditherer: Covid-19, Sovereignty, and the State of Exception — Josh Mcloughlin
“An abject figure, Johnson will serve as an object-lesson in political impotence, a catastrophic failure of the decision-making imperative that is supposed to underpin sovereignty.”
