The Fiction Issue 2009
“Sits the Queen”
Damion Searls is an author and award-winning translator, most recently of Rilke’s The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams, Proust’s On Reading, and the Robert Walser stories in this issue.
Duncan Fallowell
At 21 Duncan Fallowell was the Spectator’s first rock critic. He then released the anthology Drug Tales in 1979, before promptly giving up drugs to prevent “burning out.”
Modern Fiction Is All Rubbish
Roger Lewis’ 2002 biography of Anthony Burgess polarised critics and his latest book, Seasonal Suicide Notes, is a diary-cum-memoir that made me laugh until I pissed myself on the 185 bus.
“Dr. Morton’s Folly”
The term “living legend” gets tossed around without qualification all the time, but we think that the 83-year-old genius who literally wrote the horror classic titled I Am Legend has more than earned it.
“The Ghost Business”
T. Christopher Gorelick is a mortgage underwriter by day, and by night he’s usually sleeping. He aspires to become a professional writer.
David Simon
David Simon is responsible for one of the greatest feats of storytelling of the past century, and that’s the entire five-season run of the television series The Wire.
“Wild Geese”
Matthias Connor, aka Wolfboy, is a London-based writer who publishes fanzines that he gives to people for free. He has been doing this for more than 20 years.
Steve Jackson & Ian Livingstone
In 1982, childhood friends and über-nerds Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone started selling Brits the first ever Dungeons & Dragons game from a tiny flat in west London.
“The Faecalosaurus”
John Moore’s first brush with notoriety came at a tender age as a drummer for the Jesus and Mary Chain. The story he contributed to this issue is all about fecal matter, and it has made his mother extremely proud.
Rhinestone Tiger
I don't get expensive hair cuts anymore. But that isn't through lack of vanity. I once spent two-thirds of my monthly pay packet on a long coat that suited neither winter nor summer.
“Fathers and Snakes”
Clancy Martin used to make a living as a jewelry salesman. Now he is a translator of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri.
Pete Dexter
Besides writing hard-edged, blackly funny, and beautifully observed novels, Pete Dexter has spent a lot of time boxing, and he once got beaten so badly by an angry mob in Philadelphia that his back was broken.