All aboard HMS Potter! That yellow smoke around Stamford Bridge had us thinking we were watching Spongebob Squarepants’ gender reveal, but actually we were watching a hugely important Champions League win for Chelsea!

Pete, David and Vish discuss what it all means for Potter and his boys, whether Kai Havertz will ever escape Joelinton jail, and Vish explains why Scott Parker’s wardrobe is making his life difficult.

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January 12 – March 9, 2023

January 28 – March 11, 2023

When I was in my twenties, my grandparents finally moved out of the house my mother had grown up in. In the attic where we used to sleep as kids, and where my grandfather would come in at bedtime and sing “Goodnight, Irene” to me and my younger brother and sister as we lay in a row in our little cots, I had found my mother’s typewriter, a Royal Quiet Deluxe, perfectly preserved from her high school days. My grandfather was the sort of person who would make sure it was in pristine working order, and when I opened the case, the keys gleamed. It didn’t even need a new ribbon. It made a satisfying, well-oiled clack.

I lugged it to the house I was living in on School Street, in Northampton, Massachusetts. I had moved from California back to the same weird little valley where I had gone to college, to go to graduate school for poetry. Thankfully I did not yet know that a manual typewriter was a writerly cliché. For a while, the typewriter just sat there in the corner of my room.

I was still toiling away, writing a lot of poems the way I used to: choose a subject, and try to write something “about” it. Use a computer. Those poems always felt labored and ponderous. No matter what I said, the thoughts in them were never new. Nothing was being added by my writing. I had already figured it out, and mostly it was banal and obvious. Death is sad. The city, if you have not been informed, is lonely at night. In it, other people are mysteriously uninterested in me, which is sad and lonely for me, and for them, whether or not they know it.

Occasionally I would try to let things go completely, and exert as little control as possible over the language. Those poems were a mess, and I would stare at them afterward with bored incomprehension.

How Everything Everywhere All at Once became the wild card of the awards season

Joseph Kevin Keegan OBE. A man who needs no introduction. Serial winner, chiselled adonis and universally adored legend. So why has so much bad luck befallen such a nice man?

Marcus, Luke, Jim and Pete assemble for a joyous look at one of our favourite football sons. For every Ballon d’Or win, a bag of smashed Bulgarian pottery. For every UEFA Cup victory, a severe bicycle crash on national TV. For every bit of Entertainers magic, a red card for getting punched in the face.

It’s all here. Join us.

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January 29 – March 12, 2023

January 20 – March 11, 2023

I’ve been clean for over twenty years. Let me give you an example of the kind of problem addiction is, the scale of the thing. In April 2019 I went to the dentist. I had a mild ache in a molar. He said the whole tooth was totally rotted all the way through, that they couldn’t do anything more with it. It was hopeless. The tooth was a total piece of shit and would have to be extracted. He gave me the number of a dental surgeon and I called and made an appointment. I talked to my dad, who’d had many teeth extracted, and he told me it was no big deal. When I got to the dental surgeon’s office I told him that I’m a recovering addict, and that I wanted to avoid opiate painkillers. He looked in my mouth and when he got out he said, “You’re going to need opiate painkillers.”

Then he shot me up with Novocain and he went in there with a wrench, and I realized that dentists have soft, delicate hands and seem like doctors, like intellectuals, but when you really need dental care, you go to a dental surgeon and their main qualification is brute physical strength.

This guy had white hair and arms the size of my legs, and he put the pliers on me and wrenched and wrenched and wrenched, and despite the Novocain, the pain was like a hundred Hitlers gnawing on my nerves, gnawing them right down to the roots and then just sinking Nazi teeth up to the hilt in my brain. There was blood everywhere. I was making horrible sounds out of my throat, and the dental surgeon was saying just hold on for one more second, saying it through gritted teeth, and I was writhing in my chair with tears pouring out of my eyes.

Then it was over and he was wiping the pliers on his white coat and I thought, I never knew something like this could happen in America, and he said, “I’m going to write you a prescription for Percocet.”

We are delighted to announce that on April 4, at our Spring Revel, Harriet Clark will receive the George Plimpton Prize, and the inaugural Susannah Hunnewell Prize will be presented to Ishion Hutchinson. 

The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993 by the editorial committee of our board of directors, recognizes an emerging writer of exceptional merit published in the Review during the preceding year. Previous recipients include Yiyun Li, Ottessa Moshfegh, Emma Cline, Isabella Hammad, Jonathan Escoffery, Eloghosa Osunde, and the 2022 winner, Chetna Maroo.

Harriet Clark’s slanting, beautiful story “Descent,” which appeared in our Summer 2022 issue (no. 240), is narrated by a young girl caught between her mother—imprisoned for her part in a botched robbery intended to finance revolutionary struggle—and her grandmother, whose grief encompasses a cruel resentment. A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Clark is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and was a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford. She is at work on her first novel. The Review’s publisher, Mona Simpson, writes:

In “Descent,” Harriet Clark deftly tells an enclosing story about the wish for resurrection. An eight-year-old girl, “a great stayer,” knows departure as a fact of life. She and her grandfather simulate disappearance and recovery in a game they play with her in the trunk of the car. A silence is kept in honor of a felled deer. Strange cats attack the old man. Clark somehow manages to give us each character’s interiority: “if my mother told this story she might say that one day her father disappeared.” Clark ends where she began, with a conundrum, this time inflected with the grandmother’s harsh language: “To want to go home was to wish a man dead but I did want, very much, to go home.”