The White Review No. 18 features interviews with the one-time US presidential candidate Eileen Myles, touching upon the responsibilities of the artist and the shifting preoccupations of New York’s avant-garde; Lee Ufan, a founder of the influential Japanese movement ‘Mono-ha’ who makes the case for a style of art privileging nature over artifice; and Argentine writer César Aira, the great experimenter who nonetheless laments that critics pay so little attention to the ‘simple pleasure of the story’.

We are particularly excited, in this issue, to present short stories by two startling new talents. Jen George and Sally Rooney’s stories further this magazine’s mission to present the best new writing, while a collection of haunting, witty micro-fictions by the Syrian writer Osama Alomar (translated with C.J. Collins) fulfill our commitment to formally experimental literature in translation.

The relationship between art and literature is another of this magazine’s key concerns, and Leslie Jamison’s essay in response to the emotionally charged films of Ellen Cantor marks a significant contribution to that productive discussion between disciplines. Moving in the other direction, Denise Kupferschmidt’s drawings on book paper consider the female form in the format, if not the language, of literature. In London, Rosanna Mclaughlin frames the art fair as microcosm of the commercial and institutional art world, while Yanyan Huang’s delicate paintings and assemblages respond to the place and time of their making.

We have long admired the witty, disjointed, occasionally absurdist poems of Sam Riviere, and so are particularly pleased to present a series of his new work. These are joined by five poems by the much admired Dorothea Lasky, who concludes an issue which has for its cover two paintings by Mooni Perry.