Seven years ago a New York intern and a London journalist drunkenly decided to launch a literary periodical “unconstrained by form, subject or genre”. The White Review is now on its 20th issue, and celebrates this milestone with a frequently thrilling anthology mixing short stories, reportage, photography and literary criticism. The latter is perhaps the weakest strand, although Lauren Elkin turns a crisis of confidence into an illuminating exploration of feminist writing. The journalism is great fun – Patrick Langley and Alexander Christie-Miller paint precious pictures of the respective transformations wrought by development in London’s once booming, now ghostly Silvertown and in Turkey’s Pontus, where a people shaped by falconry and the tea trade overlook the lifeless depths of the Black Sea. The fiction ranges far and wide. China Miéville tells of urban pyromancy, Claire Louise-Bennett spins a surreal tale of suburban domesticity, while Evan Lavender-Smith provides a bleakly comic portrait of the front lines of recycling. Elsewhere, escalators, art fairs, asylum seekers, supply teachers and moss-covered rocks feature in a bold and rewarding collection.
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