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"...beautifully written and perfectly resolved in under 800 words, a hard thing to achieve." - Anne Enright Carly Holmes, whose Parthian-published novel The Scrapbook was shortlisted for the International Rubery Book Award last year, recently travelled to Ireland to receive a prize and give a reading at the Allingham Festival's Award Ceremony. Her story 'Wich' won 1st Place in their short story competition, judged by Booker Prize winner Anne Enright. The Scrapbook is a novel about memory and the unreliability of memory. It’s about the tangled, often dysfunctional, bonds of family. And it’s about absence and the power that a...

Alys Conran's Pigeon has been reviewed very favourably by Hannah Hayden for Structo magazine.Highlights from the review include Hayden's statement that 'Pigeon offers us stirring meditations on language: that it is laced with history, diegeses are built with words, and that one’s language and one’s story are bound together. Reading Pigeon, one feels the collision of past stories and the attempt to move forward, making peace with the words that created a history'. She also praises Conran's use of language, saying the narrative 'moves between English and Welsh fluidly and cohesively', with the Welsh being 'contextually discernible without lacking in subtlety', and draws...

Despite calling Mexican immigrant 'rapists.' Despite the obviously ridiculous idea of building a wall along the border of Mexico. Despite paying no taxes. Despite saying the Chinese made up climate change. Despite bilking contractors – small business owners he allegedly champions – who work on his hotels. Despite saying about women that he would 'grab them by the pussy.' Despite, despite, despite. 

Trump will be the American president. 

Everything about this election is knotted up in the pit of my stomach. Over the last few months, I have watched the presidential debates in quiet, British pubs on my iPad as I travel for my PhD. I’ve read campaign websites on trains, listened to podcasts on buses, texted friends from grey hotel rooms – How many Trump signs are in your neighbourhood? I’ve felt alone and afraid and deeply, deeply sad.

Why I reluctantly voted for Hillary yesterday: Fear

Every four years the Democrats offer the same basic platform: “We are not THAT.” They have helped foster the widening gap between rich and poor in this country (I'll go over it again: NAFTA, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, Workfare), have willingly engaged in more and more wars across the globe, have even deported more immigrants than previous Republican administrations (Article on Deportation - Fusion, statistics can also be found anywhere else throughout the net), and yet come crawling to progressives every four years with the same plea: “We’re not THAT.”

From where we stand, they have become exactly THAT.

As usual, I did not vote FOR something, but AGAINST something. I did not vote FOR Hillary, but AGAINST Trump.