The Reader 34. It’s here.

The latest issue of The Reader has just arrived in time for summer (who needs the sun to shine!?).

In issue 34 there is Simon Barnes, the great sports writer for The Times, exploring the kindred stuff of sport and literature:

Sport is not news: it is literature in the raw.

It's a packed issue, revealing the raw material (that is, the individual) behind finished works of literature.

There's new poetry from:

• Stanley Middleton
• Julie-ann Rowell
• Christy Ducker
• and David Constantine

Jacob Polley is the latest Poet on His Work, writing about his haunting poem, 'The Owls' in a piece called 'Fistfuls of Fresh Clay'.

This summer (August 6th) would have been Tennyson's 200th birthday, so look out for celebrations and fresh thinking on the nineteenth-century poet. Plus we launch our series on Get Into Reading: the Reading Revolution.

Literature is personal, it is raw and as Phil Davis says in his editorial:

For The Reader doesn't really care about too much about genre - hardly gives a damn in fact as to whether it is fiction, or poetry, or essay, or sentences in a letter. Don't be deceived: our sense of variety is not merely something liberal. It is to do with wanting the life-stuff wherever we can find it and get it.