Read Our Winter Issue

Our Winter issue is online now and will be on newsstands next week! The image on the cover—resembling an aerial map of a dense forest or perhaps a pool of gas on an icy road—is in fact a detail from one of Adebunmi Gbadebo’s extraordinary works on paper. It was made from materials including soil and cottonseed she gathered at the True Blue plantation in Fort Motte, South Carolina. Inside, you will find an Art of Criticism interview with the French writer Hélène Cixous, whose influential essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” is fifty years old this year. Cixous is best known for calling into being the seemingly impossible-to-define style of writing known as l’écriture féminine, which, as she explains to Alice McCrum, encompasses a notion of the feminine that has nothing to do with sex. “As if,” she clarifies, “the writing were by peonies or by a horse.” And in our new Art of Poetry interview with Alice Oswald, she describes being arrested in London at a Palestine Action protest. “I lay down and imagined my heaviest self,” Oswald tells Rachael Allen. “I was imagining I was made of gold or lead, just enjoying the difficulty the police were having picking me up.”

Also in our pages you will find drawings by Joan Jonas, prose by Gwendoline Riley and Elias Rodriques, poems by Ed Roberson and Jana Prikryl, and selections from Eve Babitz’s only surviving journal, kept between 1969 and 1970, in which she offers a glimpse (albeit a fleeting one) of the New Year we all aspire to have: “It’s very strange but I don’t have hangovers anymore since I stopped smoking, and I wake up at 8 a.m. every day.” The staff of the Review sends you congratulations on getting through the year, and a big thank you for reading. Happy holidays.