If you are a book lover, you have benefited from literary magazines. It doesn’t matter whether or not you curl up with them of an evening. British titles have nurtured many of our finest writers – from Virginia Woolf to Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan, down to younger authors such as Claire-Louise Bennett and Julia Armfield – and supplemented the meagre advances they may have received for their early books.
Yet such magazines are in danger. Last week, Ambit, the quarterly renowned since 1959 as a showcase for avant-garde writing (J G Ballard was once its fiction editor) was put on hiatus by its board. The current edition of the Irish literary quarterly The Moth will, after 13 years, be its last. In America, the mainstream book-review magazine Bookforum (founded in 1994) became defunct at the end of 2022, as did the fledgling fiction and poetry magazine Astra – in that case, after barely a year.
In September 1980, during the final weeks of his life, Lennon confronted this issue, admitting his frustration to journalist David Sheff. "Anybody who claims to have some interest in me as an individual artist, or even as part of the Beatles," he remarked, "has absolutely misunderstood everything I ever said if they can't see why I'm with Yoko. And if they can't see that, they don't see anything." Incredibly, not even Ono's unfathomable trauma at having witnessed her husband's senseless murder would quell the naysayers and detractors who disparage her name.
As we celebrate Ono's ascent into the ranks of the nonagenarians, we can perhaps more profitably honor her aesthetic contributions by ignoring her detractors and highlighting her artistry. By the time that she met Lennon in 1966, Ono had successfully established herself amongst the Dadaesque group of artists known as Fluxus (from the Latin word "to flow").
Why did a one-star review persuade me that I should read a book? Because of the power of polarization.
Tom Crewe’s impressive first novel set in London in the 1890s explores the possibility of unconventional relationships between men and women, based on sexual freedom. This is the ‘New Life’ of the title, a dangerous prospect, when sodomy was still a crime punishable by penal servitude.