MIR Editor

  • 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.

  • WILL SHE EVER PUNCTU8 HIM?, by Bediye Topal

    he is an endless incoherent sentence in her body if she questions him words will blur letters will change their position explain to me will be

  • THE SHORT STORY THAT WON LOUIE CONWAY SECOND IN THE BRICK LANE BOOKSHOP PRIZE, by Summer Kendrick

    ,

    “The baby understands with a kind of instinctive visceral despair that a process of change is underway which, once complete, cannot be reversed.”

  • PARAKEETS OF LONDON, by JB Smith

    If you take a walk through one of London’s many parks, the chances are you will see a parakeet. Indeed, the likelihood is you will see dozens of the things, caterwauling amongst the trees in rowdy flocks of yellow and green.

  • I HAVE NOTHING NEW TO SAY, by Sinéad MacInnes

    SINÉAD MACINNES On your whistle-stop tour of the Highlandsand Islands our whispers are saidto be heard by native ears O Dhiadè rinn iad?               Oh God              what have              they done? Aon.One. The Barabhas moor on Lewis is empty. Leòdhas –…

  • X AND I, by Bediye Topal

    I belong to a race whose alphabet contains the letters Q, W and X. They are letters. Just letters like any others. But for the Turkish state, these aren’t just letters. They banned them.

  • MIR ONLINE – back at last

    The Mechanics’ Institute Review (MIR) is a forum for the most exciting new writing in short fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction. We’re doing some work on the site

  • SIX OF THE BEST, by Tim Bradford

    Probably shouldn’t include something by a Birkbeck staffer but I’m not a student now so – fuck it.