The Manchester Review: Issue 3 published

12 Oct 2009

Read the latest issue of Centre for New Writing's online journal

You can now read the latest issue of online arts journal The Manchester Review, which is published by the University’s Centre for New Writing. The third issue features a new Writers Talk interview between two leading science fiction writers, China Miéville and Manchester’s Geoff Ryman.

Following on from MJ Hyland’s interview with Colm Toibin in issue two, Ryman probes Miéville about the necessity for the novelist to be political, about the image of Science Fiction as genre fiction and also defends genre fiction and asks 'where, now, is the great liberal novel?'

Closer to home, also featured is a terrific extract from a work in progress by Granta ‘Best of Young British’ novelist Rachel Seiffert. Its picture of a relationship developing in Northern Ireland and Scotland is a new departure for Seiffert.

The Scottish-Irish relationship is also prominent in Alan Gillis’s new sonnets, which inhabit Scottish ring roads, motorways and ferry ports, the kind of in-between places that are the subject of David Gledhill’s empty, atmospheric paintings, two of which are reproduced in issue 3, one showing the destruction of Ancoats in advance of a building project which has subsequently stalled.

The new issue is also proud to publish new poems by the brilliant American poet Rodney Jones and a long poem by New Zealander Jenny Bornholdt. Bornholdt’s relaxed open style and Jones’s fables offer oblique and sustaining angles on the mundane and fantastic worlds presented by other Review contributors, including, as his ‘Chanterelles’ has it:

songs with morals, light things
broadcast before the planetary
news on the undergroundstation.