A feature in which we present an exciting new writer whom you should keep an eye on and ask them a few questions.

Questions by Dan Eltringham
The Literateur is delighted to present up-and-coming poet Michael McKimm.
Michael McKimm was born in Belfast in 1983 and grew up near the Giant’s Causeway. He graduated from the Warwick Writing Programme in 2004 and won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007. His poetry is most recently published in Dossier Journal (New York), Horizon Review, Magma, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, The Warwick Review, The Wolf and …

Laurence Klavan
He turned the steering wheel hard to the right, changing lanes without having signaled. The driver of the car behind him, whom he had just cut off, blared his horn, then tail-gated him, bitterly, before moving left. The other man drove parallel for awhile, giving him the finger, before hitting the gas and whizzing away.
Get a life, Bill Chubbuck thought. Then, forgetting the other man immediately, he thought: I hate that expression. I wonder who made it up: probably some poor dumb bastard like me. Now, through no fault …

The Infinities
By John Banville
Picador, 300 pp, Hardcover, £14.99
ISBN 978 0 330 45024 9

The kernel of John Banville’s The Infinities comes from a Heinrich von Kleist play, Amphitryon (in turn a salute to Molière,) in which Jupiter and Mercury visit the home of the titular Greek general so that Jupiter might, disguised as Amphitryon, seduce his wife Alcmene. Antics (as is usual in cases of hidden identity) ensue.
In Banville’s version, we are set in a world slightly different to our own, where cold fusion works and Sweden is an aggressive military …

Robin Boothroyd
On the wall hangs an intricate
diagram akin to Dalí’s
Raphaelesque Head Exploding.
It shows the workings of a watch
suspended like a deck of cards
between a magician’s fingers.
Dotted lines straight as vapour trails
guide the eye down through the levels,
helping them to build in the mind
the image of a watch with ease.
Opposite the wall stands a desk.
Its drawers house a nest of watches
which softly whisper polyrhythms.
Beside them hangs a grey leather
trough to catch any tumbling
mechanisms. When William
sits down, it is almost to dine:
his knurled tools act like cutlery,
and the leather – stiff as …

Lanterns On Their Horns
by Radhika Jha
Beautiful Books, Hardback, £14.99, pp. 480
ISBN 9781905636655
Jane Stewart
Radhika Jha introduces this, her second novel, with a few words which help contextualise its themes. Gau is the Sanskrit word for cow, she tells us, but it is also the word for “the first ray of light, the eldest child of dawn”. Set in rural India, this engaging book does indeed feature cows, showing their centrality to village life as cherished beasts reflecting the wealth of their owners and as providers of daily sustenance, but it is …

Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, and the Inheritance of a Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry

Jess Chandler

Walt Whitman was a paradoxical figure. The (purportedly heterosexual) father of American poetry, progenitor of ‘a great original literature’[1] was simultaneously claimed by an emerging homosexual tradition as the creator of a discourse of homosexual poetics. The critical history surrounding Whitman’s work testifies to the persistent negation of a homosexual presence in literary standards. Critics consistently denied the possibility of Whitman’s homosexual poetics in order to preserve the stability of his position as America’s …

Wivenhoe Bookshop found here

Ling Low
When a branch of Ottakars opened up in my hometown about ten years ago, I was snobbishly high minded about its various distractions. Among the bookshop’s colourful and – I thought – superfluous diversions there was an interactive contraption in the children’s section, and shelves full of toys on prominent display. I thought all this a cheap and cynical ploy to get people to stay in the shop. But then, I was the kind of child who liked lining up Penguin Classics in …

The Year of the Flood
By Margaret Atwood
Hardback, Bloomsbury, pp. 448, ISBN 0747585164, Price: £18.99
Gordon Weetman
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood’s last full-length novel, dealt with the consequences of accelerating technological progress. In a world where knowledge has overtaken morality, the effects of runaway genetic engineering wreak untold damage on the environment. The Year of the Flood returns us to this looking-glass future – an eerily plausible dystopia controlled by shadow Corporations, where laissez-faire capitalism is king and science is out of control.
Chicken nuggets are grown in research labs, while biologists feel …

AN A-Z OF POSSIBLE WORLDS
By A.C.Tillyer
Roast Books, 300 pp., ISBN 190689406X, Price £20
Kit Toda
The first thing you notice about An A-Z of Possible Worlds is that it’s not really a book. It’s a beautifully designed box in which nestles 26 little booklets of stories, one for every letter of the alphabet. In fact it is so attractively packaged that I couldn’t bring myself to scribble in the margins, as I usually do when reviewing works.
But all this prettiness would be a mere waste of effort if the stories were badly …

John Banville is the author of several novels including The Sea, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2005. After publishing three crime novels as Benjamin Black, he has returned with his latest work, The Infinities. He speaks to us about his new book, not despising the audience, lies, reality and pagan gods.
Interviewed by Katherine Wootton
TL: You write reviews and you were a literary editor and section editor for a while; how do you feel about things moving online and the newspaper books sections slowly diminishing or being put online?
JB: …