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Monthly Dispatch #25 — June 2025
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A letter from the editor[s]
An embarrassment of riches in terms of subjects on which to pontificate this month. Not only did we run our ANONYMOU[S] series, whose conditions always provoke certain tensions, but last Friday we also held an online conversation on the question: “What do we want from novels?” An array of half-baked, developing, and digressive ideas have been sloshing around in its wake, from issues of genre, to reading through displeasure, from the catch-all “interesting” being used to describe novels that attempt to go beyond predominant realist modes, to the validity (or otherwise) of acknowledging a literary mystical. As the full conversation is available on YouTube, we won’t offer more than that hyper-abbreviated precis here, but there is a corollary point to raise, that being: it was a pleasure to see people will turn up for such a thing.
minor lits, as is, wouldn’t exist if not for the relationships cultivated over Twitter during the pandemic, when these kinds of gatherings were happening all the time. We’ve used up enough characters in previous posts complaining about the degraded/degrading experience of relying on such platforms as a stand-in for literary community (and a means of cultivating readership …), but we can’t deny how satisfying it was to see that the connections formed have held and new ones have been made.
So it looks like we will try and run similar events in future; keep your eyes peeled for announcements ... The channels are open (including submissions throughout August*), and an engaged and thoughtful audience is out there. As many reasons as there currently are to lament, it would do a disservice not to recognise the minor victories.
The Editor[s]
*We’ll be open for essays, fiction and experimental pieces. All relevant info can be found here.
ANONYMOU[S] is a brief series of texts submitted, read, and published anonymously, with the agreement of the author not to reveal themself.
Ethnographic Fictions (an Exercise in Anomie)
“An interpretation might emerge anywhere. A non-narrative documentary might invite the unwanted, or unwarranted …”
Little World
“A lot of what’s false and malicious in the world comes from people harboring just that idea: that they could ever be safe, clean, saved …”
An Excerpt from the Journals of Albrecht Plums*
*Discovered in a storage unit in West Rockport, Maine
“1988. Spring. Taka and I discussed the possibility of a housing bubble over unadon at Nagoya Station. The eel was grilled to perfection …”
in/consequence
“01. Dispersion is not mere disunity, but an active form of inconsequence: a disarticulated proliferation that blocks the formation of stable signifying chains …”
Spud-ology — Neil Burns
“In the beginning of the begun, Jah pondered in a reverie of glimmering ennui, waiting for nothing to happen …”
Neil Burns is Northern Irish. He has been published in The London Magazine, The Rialto, The Honest Ulsterman, Cassandra Voices and The Agonist Literary Journal.
On Not Not Reading DFW after The Yak: Fabula Mirabilis — Eleanor Fuller
“Our woman suffers from a certain snobbery. Of the educated. It needs to be made clear that this is not class snobbery since hers is squarely, squarely and firmly, working. Her grandfather and great-grandfather being stove fitters …”
Eleanor Fuller won The Malahat’s 2023 Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction and was a finalist in The Fiddlehead’s 2023 fiction contest and the 2024 Cambridge Short Story Prize. Her stories appear in The Moth, The Manchester Review, Split Lip and elsewhere. A 2024 Edith Wharton-Straw Dog Writers Guild Writer-in-Residence, she lives in Toronto. Twitter: @_Eleanor_Fuller ; BlueSky: @eleanorfuller.bsky.social
Hey Frankie — Marc de Faoite
“Victor Frankenstein checks into the hotel in Evian-les-Bains without much formality …”
Marc de Faoite is a freelance writer and editor. His short stories, articles, and book reviews have been published both in print and online. Tropical Madness, a first collection of his short stories, was published in 2013. Lime Pickled and Other Stories, his second collection, was published in January 2023. Second Main/Second Hand—a bilingual collection of poems by French poet Michel Lagrange and translated by de Faoite—was published in January 2024. He can be found at www.marcdefaoite.com and on Bluesky @marcdefaoite.bsky.social
Phoretics: After Hazlitt — Israel A. Bonilla
“Life surpasses all attempts at capture, and so we fool ourselves by reducing it to a few moments of great intensity …”
Israel A. Bonilla lives in Guadalajara, Jalisco. He is author of the micro-chapbook Landscapes (Ghost City Press, 2021) and the short story collection Sleep Decades (Malarkey Books, 2024). His work has appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Exacting Clam, Firmament, Able Muse, new_sinews, and elsewhere. Twitter: @iab9208
In Solidarity — Rez Marino [11/06/2020]
“We marched in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter protests that demanded justice for the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. We held up the placards high weighed down by the same burden of systemic racism and police brutality. We are here again with the fight never to return again …”
Rez Marino is a London-based researcher and content producer. He uses the mediums of photography, the written word, long and short form visual content as well as audio documentaries. His work has always aimed to tell the human story, whilst exploring the central themes of culture and identity. Marino aims to continuously shift what is considered the “margins” of society by placing marginalised stories in central focus. Twitter: @RezMarino
Coming next month …
Extracts from work by Inez Baranay, Alvin Lu, Stephen Sunderland, & Kat Meads; interviews with Daisy Atterbury & Lou Syrah; fiction from Sam Glover & Zachary Issenberg, & more …