A short story — Let me hypnotise you. No, seriously, this will be fun. It’s the summer of last year, so what are you doing? Okay, so you want me to go first? We don’t have a pocket watch, so you’ll have to light up your phone screen and swing it if you want…

Some of these fiction stories were published in commercial paperbacks and one in a literary journal. The audio recordings (these are not videos) with a gorgeous cast of radio actors are currently available for your delectation on Youtube (links below): Honey Bear. Link: https://youtu.be/yoNhe_Mv5g0 Genealogy Club. Link: https://youtu.be/5Jr2KfeJTBA It’s Time to Talk About Frankie. Link: https://youtu.be/2dekBmgJ_pE

“Please stop crying, Maisie. You don’t mind if I call you Maisie, or is it Maisey?” asked the young professional in her neat and organised office. Sitting aside from the desk with a plant pot and sign reading ‘Brigitte Hamilton, Youth Mental Health Counsellor’, she tried to engage the parent’s…

A runcing light spoils my book, the bulb decaying to orange and split-crackling for attention. Discharge throes of the silent electrical world around me. We’re deep in the night, the bulb, the novel and I, with no shops open. We persist, nosing closer to the page. My glasses make no…

And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks, by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, is a formerly lost book, which is a must-have category simply because you can’t have it. Rarity value is obvious in the commodities market (food, metals) but demand is illogical too because if cormorant poos…

In Memoriam: Yulia Zdanovskaya, a 21-year-old mathematician, was killed on March 8th, 2022 during a Russian attack on Kharkiv. In 2017, Yulia represented Ukraine at the European Mathematical Olympiad and won a silver medal.

I really like the idea that electrical current is a magical state enabled in the Dark Ages by a sorcerer’s craft, but we think of it as normal because it has always been there. Then, when the spell is broken, the modern world is switched off. Do it, do it, do it! Oh, as I speak, Russia’s already doing it.

An imaginative book from the author who was paid-off when he sued Hollywood for lifting a plot from his earlier novel which they turned into the film Alien. …

“Faith’s a compulsive reader” Agnes tells the tortured musician on a break who has come over to our table of six students; one daring guy. …