N E W . W R I T I N G . 1 3 .

I N T R O D U C T I O N

So, what’s new?

The common assumption is that the realm of the new is the
playground of the young – or, at least, that it is the young who
monopolize all the really fun stuff. There they are, shouting from
the very top of the climbing frame, building radical cities in the
sandpit. The truth is that the young may equally well be stuck on
the accelerating roundabout or hitting repetitive highs and lows
on the swings.

Meanwhile, newness is quite a venerable category. There’s not
much that’s new about it. In the 1930s, when a magazine called
New Writing was first published, it had to compete with New
Signatures, New Country, New Verse, The New Statesman and
Nation and New Theatre, and what with the New Woman of the
1890s and new everything else, even then, new wasn’t the new
new.

So, here’s new writing from Muriel Spark and John Berger
and Edwin Morgan, as well as a story by Heloise Shepherd,
eighteen and not yet done with university.

If we’ve achieved diversity, it’s because our submissions were
themselves diverse; and the final selection is representative of the
proportion of short stories to novel extracts, poems and essays
that were submitted.

We read our way through the unsolicited submissions alpha-betically,
by surname. Our first reaction, in each case, was given
(via email) without knowing the other editor’s reaction. Our only
criterion with each and every piece was whether it worked for
both of us. It was surprising – though reassuring – that we agreed
ninety five per cent of the time, and were able to compromise
within seconds on much of the remainder.

The most popular form by far was the short story. This is probably explained by there being, at the moment, so few outlets for shorter prose fiction. In the end though, as we read through
the large stack of manuscripts, we began to believe that some-where
out there is a strange, pseudo-English country called Short-Story-
Land where all day long, peculiarly short-story-like things
happen. We began to dread starting a story only to find we were
once again in Short-Story-Land.

It’s worth pointing out: a lot of what was submitted was
dauntingly undaring. On the whole the submissions from women
were disappointingly domestic, the opposite of risk-taking – as if
too many women writers have been injected with a special drug
that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the
right shape, and melancholy at doing it, depressed as hell. Thank
god for the writers here, then, who refute this strange trend; to
name just a few – Nicola Barker’s understanding of the strange-ness
of social structure, Frances Gapper’s pier-end eccentricity,
Kamila Shamsie’s visceral force, Susan Irvine’s good aggressive-ness
of form, Monique Roffey’s theatrical panache.

We have opted, throughout, for writing that renews language
itself, or battles with the old shapes of things. What this book
reveals, most interestingly, is a generation of, yes, young male
writers who have gleefully ignored Short-Story-Land and all its
dutifulness: Pete Hobbs, Martin Ouvry, James Hopkin, Steven
Hall, Tim Jarvis. Writers not so in love with realism; writers keen
to ditch the -ism.

With novel extracts, we have tried to choose the sections that
work in and of themselves – though it is hard to imagine the
reader that wouldn’t want immediately to keep reading the new
novels of Shyam Selvadurai, Kate Atkinson and David Mitchell,
all briefly excerpted here.

Essays and other non-fictional writing were the rarest sub-missions,
but the two we’ve included, from Lawrence Norfolk
and Paul Bailey, have themes remarkably in common.
Much contemporary poetry, judging from our submissions,
seems insecure about its validity as poetry. In order to justify its
existence, it will build upon non-fictional information: histories,
biographies, secondary sources of all sorts. Many poems have the
tone of ‘and here’s another interesting and little known fact’. The
madly visionary, the harshly satirical, the straightforwardly funny
– all these modes seem out of use.

One of the most interesting poets we read is Ismail B. Garda,
who undermines notions of poetic originality by taking originals
as templates (Sylvia Plath’s ‘Poppies in October’, for example)
and grafting different words onto their recognisable syntaxes and
rhythmic structures. Being unoriginal, in his case, leads to some-thing
more inventive and innovative than the ‘sincere’ emotions
of many other people who submitted work to us.

Originality is only proven over time, paradoxically. We are
confident that some of the names here you’ve never heard before
will become very familiar. They may even disgrace themselves by
winning prizes, becoming established, etc. But they’ll be the kinds
of writer, like the known names published here, for whom
everything they write is a renewal – of language, of place, of the
senses and of the contemporary.

Toby Litt
Ali Smith