In This Issue

Three stories, new fiction.

Commissioned from writers we have not previously printed. Dylan Oyewole, Anya Teal, Marion Grace.

from p. 62

On the late work of authors who ought not to have kept writing.

Dr Claudia Vance reads Roth's unfinished novels.

by Dr C. Vance

Reviews, briefly.

Eight books, four hundred words each. No stars, no rankings, no affiliate links.

various hands

Errata.

Five corrections to issue No. 46. We apologise in detail.

Lead essay · p. 14 of the spring issue

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

Reading Samuel Beckett's six thousand letters, and the slow argument with the sentence that became, in the end, his whole work.

by Dr Ines Keogh · Editor · 14 pages · 3,800 words

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, which itself apologised for the hasty note of Sunday.

The sentence he kept was, in the end, the one that had survived the ones he cut.

In the winter of 1951 Beckett spent the best part of three weeks on one sentence. We know this because in the third week he finally wrote to Thomas MacGreevy and described what he had been doing. The letter is sardonic — Beckett always is, about his own inability — but something in its detail makes the sentence visible.

He describes taking it apart. He describes putting it back together. He describes putting it back together wrongly. He describes, eventually, abandoning it, because the version he could have lived with was the one that no longer belonged in the page it had been written for.

That sentence did not survive into the published work. I have checked. But what did survive — as far as I can tell, what survived across the whole of the subsequent thirty years — was the discipline that sentence taught him.

[essay continues on p. 14 of the printed issue].

Features · pages 28–60

Three essays, inside the issue.

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

Correspondence · page 202

Letters to the editor.

On the translation essay, No. 46.

Dr Okonkwo's argument that fidelity in translation is overrated made a useful provocation, but I wonder whether, in practice, the readers she was addressing ever confused fidelity with literalism. Anyone working with a commercial publisher has been trained out of the distinction — if anything, the pendulum has swung too far. One would like a translated novel that reads, occasionally, as though it had first been written in the other language.

— Anna Brescia, London

On book covers and the cover for the autumn issue.

Your autumn cover — the one with the red book on the grey table — reminded my wife of a painting we both know from a small gallery in Prato. We would be delighted if you could tell us who made it, and whether they know how much the cover reminded us.

— Giulio Menassa, Prato

On Irish memoirs.

I note in your winter issue that you continue to use the phrase "the Irish memoir revival", as though we are in a continuous decade-long phenomenon. It has been twelve years since my first book on this subject, and I am as surprised as anyone that it is still fashionable, but I would encourage the editor to consider that, at some point, a revival that has lasted longer than the thing being revived becomes, simply, the literature.

— Dr Siobhan Breen, Galway