MIR Editor

  • A LOOK BEHIND AN INDIE PUBLISHING HOUSE – INKSPOT PUBLISHING, Interview by Akshay Gajria

    While studying an MA in Creative Writing, it was ritual to follow up our classes with a pint of beer in a nearby pub. This, of course, was where the real learning happened: sitting across your peers over a pint and sharing ideas, discussing and dissecting that day’s class. These always led to newer, better,…

  • JENNY GREENTEETH: ECO-HORROR AND INDUSTRY, by David Renton

    What makes a compelling folk monster? In many of the great films of that genre, the monstrous is human – a witchfinder who uses his power capriciously to torture innocent women, the conspiring inhabitants of an island ignored by the authorities and hostile to them. In others, the monsters are something natural, seemingly benign –…

  • INTERNAL COMBUSTION IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE (AND OTHER POEMS), by John Greening

    Internal Combustion in Buckinghamshire The Cowper and Newton Museum is closed so I walk out (passing the Soul Garage) towards a country park where the flooded Ouse glares back and a tape tells me I’m forbidden. In the churchyard there is no reply from the slave-trader who is frowned on by a grim stone mask.…

  • APPRENTICESHIP, by Penny Walker

    Before earth, sea and sky, and before this community, I commit to protect the deep legacy from human disturbance, and to protect the world from the legacy, through the ten thousand years of its danger. I will preserve the records, knowledge and memory of this repository and what is buried here. This is my turn…

  • SIX OF THE BEST, by Bruno Noble

    What does one look for in a novel?  For me, it’s ideas and fine writing.  I gave a friend a book by John Updike once, and he said he hated being pulled out of the story to think, Oh what, a beautiful sentence this is!  But not me.  I like to wrap fine sentences around…

  • SEVEN-SEVENTY, by Jake Kendall

    The moonlight broke through the clouds; the wet-churned mud of the thoroughfare turned briefly into molten silver as it caught the light.

  • BY THE LIGHTS OF PICCADILLY, by Nadia Martin

    I watched images of a pouting statuesque beauty burst in two dimensions, frolicking inside the framed void, peering nonchalantly into the private room. Between flashes of the red swirling backdrop, I cast my eye over the nightstand, harbouring detritus of a life I knew too well: gin bottles, a candy storefront line-up of pills, Pepto-Bismol…

  • SIX OF THE BEST, by JB Smith

    To read Carlo Rovelli is to have your hand taken by a kindly Italian man with a soft voice and enigmatic smile, then led gently down the rabbit hole into a quantum wonderland where the only thing you can be certain of is that certainty doesn’t exist.

  • HALO, by Ben Tufnell

    Just days after placing the book on the shelf I run a finger across the cover and leave a faint wake of darkness.

  • PRO-NUN-SEE-AY-SHUN, by Bediye Topal

    You tell me to shape sounds with my mouth. I tell you, I have left my tongue behind.