It features a delightful exchange with writer Wayne Koestenbaum on the humiliations of the writing life (‘Writing for me involves anguish, ecstasy, yes – and also frustration, disappointment, horror, embarrassment I subject myself to inward Karajanesque ferocious coaching; a sadistic répétiteur, I prod myself until the larynx opens’) Koestenbaum, echoing his ‘Legend’ column, also indulges in some ekphrasis, commenting on a series of images including ‘Nico and Andy Warhol as Batman and Robin’ Fiction-wise, we’re delighted to introduce Alex Kovacs, whose début novel The Currency of Paper is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press Here’s the blurb: ‘Maximilian Sacheverell Hollingsworth is a counterfeiter, sculptor, filmmaker, sound artist, mystic, and terminal recluse, and over the course of fifty years, making use of a vast stockpile of illegitimate currency, he funds a great range of secret, large-scale art projects throughout London — from explorations of the far reaches of the imagination to more civic-minded schemes of an equally radical nature At once a strikingly original satire of the ways in which art and currency conspire to favour certain voices and forms over others, and a story of surreal anti-capitalist machinations reminiscent of the works of B S Johnson and Georges Perec, The Currency of Paper announces the arrival of a great new voice in contemporary fiction’ Also online this month, ‘Famous Tombs: Love in the 90s’, an essay on Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder, written by Masha Tupitsyn as part of a series on mourning & melancholia for her new book, Screen to Screen; two new poems by Les Kay; and an essay on art and national trauma by Rob Sharp that takes the work of Haitian artists made in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake as its starting point