Our May 2012 online issue leads with a superb and previously untranslated early short story, ‘Reflux’, by Nobel Prize for Literature laureate José Saramago Also online this month are a career-retrospective interview with the delightfully jaded Jonathan Safran Foer on the art of writing and how not to conceptualise it; an essay on Russian Ark, art, and the aura according to Walter Benjamin by critic Scott Esposito; a short documentary film on PalFest by Murat Gökmen, introduced by Omar Robert Hamilton; and poems by Sam Riviere and Sarah Howe We also have new fiction from Seraphina Madsen