This is an excellent book size issue of a UK literary magazine which carries the subtitle of "The Magazine of New Writing". This was issue 101 from Spring 2008 and is incredibly diverse. A couple of the highlights for me included a short piece by Hilary Mantel that amazed me in just a few pages describing something she acquired in Saudia Arabia in 1984. An outstanding piece of non-fiction on 'The Paris Intifada' let me see a part of modern Paris that I had no idea about and let me have a new understanding of what is going on there. There was also a remarkable man on the street view of what happened in Beijing to prepare for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. There are several fiction pieces in here which were perhaps the weakest part of the material, but nothing terrible in the fiction. Annie Proulx's story about a family was good but the end didn't feel right. There was also an interesting photo essay of the Arctic, a strong piece concerning pilots during the war in Angola and many other interesting things and I can only hope that other issues come close to this quality. ( )

The typography thing by Douglas Coupland was largely pointless, but I especially enjoyed Gautier Deblonde's Arctic photography and the description of the effects of nuclear testing on Kiritimati. ( )