Now Available: The Reader Magazine Issue 37

It's here! The latest issue of The Reader magazine, which we have called  ‘Knowing By Heart’ and seems to us, unashamedly, one of the most emotional yet.

Buy it here, or send us a cheque for £7.00 (made payable to The Reader Organisation) to The Reader magazine, 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool, L69 7ZG.

If you want to know a bit more about what awaits you, highlights include:

* In ‘Memoir’, David Constantine writes movingly about his father’s depression and his uncertain utterances:

Before he died I often felt I should want to speak for him; now it would be truer to say I want to reassure him… I used to want to hide my eyes in love and pity from the spectacle of such an openness to wounding… Here was a man trying something out, often nothing very much, with all the confidence he could muster; often not much. Therein their force to trouble and move me lay.

* Richard Gwyn provides a bewildering vivid account of his experience of hepatic encephalopathy, or as he calls it ‘brain fog’, describing the puzzlement of being at the centre of a neurological disease, inwardly stuck and aware of losses that awareness cannot restore.

* Poet on His Work: Michael Schmidt (author of the brilliantly useful Lives of the English Poets and editor of PN Review) writes on his poem, ‘Also, Poor Yorick’.

* New poetry by Neil Curry, Patrick McGuinness, Alison Brackenbury and Julie-ann Rowell.

* Hanif Kureishi writes on the relationship of the teacher of creative writing to the students in their struggle to realise their subject matter.

* David Almond (author of Skellig and the 2009 Liverpool Reads book The Savage) talks to Jane Davis about his schooldays and his relationship to books, writing and religion.