New Writing

by Toby Litt (Editor), Ali Smith (Editor), Steven Hall

As editors Toby Litt and Ali Smith explain in their introduction: "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. . . 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. 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."

Paperback

Published January 1, 2005

About the author

Toby Litt was born in Bedfordshire, England. He studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia where he was taught by Malcolm Bradbury, winning the 1995 Curtis Brown Fellowship.

He lived in Prague from 1990 to 1993 and published his first book, a collection of short stories entitled Adventures in Capitalism, in 1996.

In 2003 Toby Litt was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists'.

In 2018, he published Wrestliana, his memoir about wrestling, writing, losing and being a man.

His novel, A Writer's Diary, was published by Galley Beggar Press on January 1st 2022.

A Writer's Diary continues daily on Substack.

He lives in London and is the Head of Creative Writing at the University of Southampton.

Reviews

[celia · Rating 4 out of 5]

im gonna write this review in english since there are no reviews and i want people to have other opinions as well, but it is so utterly random the way i encountered this collection, bea just pointed it out on a second-hand bookshop saying "isn't that your favorite author?" meaning, of course, ali smith. i had never seen these books, i think they are actually a really cool concept, and loved to see ali smith's taste through all of it. there's a lot of innovation, although it's hard to judge the whole collection because it is not a complete or woven-through compendium, it's just stories people submitted. it has just been a really nice experience, it has taken me more than a year to read it since bea found it in Madrid the day we saw each other after our last and final kiss, i think i bought one book for her, i don't remember which. it has ridden with me on the train to university in barcelona, i just finished it on the plane back from ireland. it feels like i've been accompanied by a lot of people (including john berger, i love him and loved the story he submitted!) through this year and a half. also, very nice when you have lost the habit of reading, it motivated me to try to read at least one poem or story each trip. (in one of those trips, an old man thought it was an esoteric book, which i hadn't thought but does make sense... it's a blank cover with a big 13).