On what we don't say, and why we keep writing anyway.

The spring issue of The Quarter collects seven essays on silence in contemporary writing — the pause before a sentence, the paragraph that wasn't written, the twenty-page scene cut by the author's own hand.

Edited by Ines Keogh · Cover lithograph by Martin Greer

From the Issue

Three essays.

Essay 01 · on silence

The paragraph that doesn't arrive

Beckett's letters, taken together, are the record of a long argument with the page — with the sentence, and then with the idea that a sentence is the right unit at all. Six thousand of them. Over forty years. What emerges when you read them chronologically is not a writer sharpening his craft but a writer losing faith in the craft and continuing nonetheless.

What draws me back is not the drafts themselves but the letters about the drafts, and above all the letters about letters about drafts — the third-degree correspondence in which Beckett apologises to a friend for the apology he sent on Tuesday.

by Dr Ines Keogh · 14 pages · p.14

Essay 02 · on walking

After Sebald, the long walk gets shorter

We are in a period of literary walks that go nowhere in particular. Sebald, of course, began this — but his walks had their reason, and their reasons had a shape. The walks of the last decade have dispensed even with the shape. They begin nowhere. They end nowhere. They have nothing to say, and a great deal of time to say it in.

This is not a complaint. The walk that goes nowhere is the walk that does not end.

by Marcus Idris · 11 pages · p.28

Essay 03 · late work

The novels Roth didn't write

There are twelve novels Roth did not finish. Two of them survive in fragmentary form. Most have been destroyed. We know, because he told us — in paragraphs we now pay attention to in a way we did not at the time. He told us in his last long interview with the Paris Review; he told us in a lecture in New Haven in 2011 that lasted, if the transcript is accurate, twenty-two minutes before he stopped.

What he did not tell us is why.

by Dr Claudia Vance · 17 pages · p.44

— The Long Read 42 pages · featured in No. 47

Twelve years, one poem: on the return of Cape Finisterre.

In 2012, the Irish poet Michael Healy began a poem he said he would finish when he had the leisure to do so. It is now 2026, and he has.

Michael Healy has been writing Cape Finisterre for twelve years. The first drafts appeared in a Christmas pamphlet that circulated among his friends in Limerick in 2014; by 2016 he was telling interviewers that the poem was "in its middle third"; in 2019, that it was "nearly a third of its length"; by 2022, that it "may be as long as it is ever going to be". He was wrong. In March 2026, he posted the finished manuscript to his editor at Boiler Press. It runs to seventy-two pages. This essay is its first public assessment.

What is most surprising about the finished work is not its length, which was rumoured, nor its form, which is visible as soon as the first page is turned, but its restraint. A reader of Healy's earlier sequences — the propulsive, rather noisy Sprat Weather, for instance — will arrive at Cape Finisterre expecting an accumulation. What arrives is a winnowing.

"The poem, he said, was trying not to say the thing it was about."

That sentence, if it is a paraphrase, is close to the interview Healy gave our senior editor in the autumn of 2024, which has not been published. What he was describing, and what I take it the poem enacts, is a discipline of refusal. Each section of Cape Finisterre circles a subject and declines to name it; names near it; and returns, finally, to the landscape of the cape itself — which, the reader slowly understands, is also a refusal. The cape is what the poem reaches in place of what the poem would rather have said.

Healy himself has said, in the two brief interviews he has given since completing the work, that the twelve years of writing were not years of writing so much as years of erasing. I believe him. The manuscript arrived with Boiler Press accompanied by nineteen pages of cuts — sections that have not made it into the final text but have, I think, earned their place alongside it. Reading them is a peculiar experience; one begins to suspect that Healy's method now requires the cut material to exist somewhere for the finished material to hold its weight.

[… continues in the printed issue, over thirty pages.]

Contents · No. 47

01.

Editor's LetterFrom Ines Keogh

I. Keogh p.7 02.

The paragraph that doesn't arriveEssay on Beckett's correspondence

I. Keogh p.14 03.

After Sebald, the long walk gets shorterEssay

M. Idris p.28 04.

The novels Roth didn't writeEssay

Dr C. Vance p.44 05.

Three storiesNew fiction

Various p.62 06.

Twelve years, one poem: on Cape FinisterreThe long read

L. Abendroth p.94 07.

ReviewsEight books, briefly

Various p.170 08.

Notes on Contributorsand a list of errata

— p.210