Welcome to the second issue of The Manchester Review, in which we are pleased to publish new work by Sean O’Brien, Amit Chaudhouri, Helen Dunmore and Elaine Feinstein alongside the work of younger writers. We also have MJ Hyland’s fascinating interviews with Colm Toibin and Andrew O’Hagan.

Putting this issue together, and reading it, it is uncanny to see writers returning to the same ideas and images. The hall mirror’s blank reflection at the end of Tom French’s Real Estate asks questions about building and construction, questions which are variously answered by Anthony Caleshu’s Early Morning, Forecastle, by Nathan O’Donnell’s big house fiction and by Conor O’Callaghan’s zigzgagging Emergency. O’Callaghan’s in-between states are echoed in much of the other work, including Nick Laird’s portrait poems (themselves shadowing Linda Chase’s responses to portraits by Juan Munoz and David Hockney), and Sean O’Brien’s beautiful The River on the Terrace and his elegy for Archie Markham.

Markham’s position as a writer in a university is mentioned in O’Brien’s poem, and the subject of institutions and writers obviously chimes with this university-based review. It is also the entire subject of Nick Royle’s Creative Writing, a brilliantly constructed fable about universities and money: what is Andrew O’Hagan’s ‘writer’s room’ doing in the story? It is a question which O’Hagan does not answer in his interview with MJ Hyland.

Hyland’s interview with Colm Toibin, on the other hand, includes an exchange which might belong in Philip Larkin’s The Life with the Hole in it his envious fantasia about the novelist, ‘who does his five hundred words / Then parts out the rest of the day / Between bathing and booze and birds.’ When asked ‘What do you enjoy most about your life as a writer?' Toibin answers: ‘The money. I never knew there would be money.’

The Manchester Review hosts a regularly updated set of reviews and audio recordings of visiting writers which you can find on the left-hand navigation panel. We welcome submissions for issue 3 which will go live in October.

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