Many aspects of the comics form have entered popular consciousness but none is quite as ubiquitous as the bubble. In order to work as a narrative form, comics are required to make visible…
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Category: Previous Issues
Involving Animals
From Neolithic cave painting, through to writers as diverse as Rainer Maria Rilke, Dante Alighieri, Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar…
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From Genre to Zenre
In response to the question “what are you reading, my lord?” the young prince simply says “words, words, words!” (Shakespeare, 74). But perhaps the answer Polonius was looking for was a more…
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Editorial: Critical Environments
In Barbara Kingsolver’s 2012 novel Flight Behaviour, environmental crisis arrives in a remote Tennessee town in the form of the migrating Monarch butterfly…
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Re-Approaching Urban Nature
‘What exactly was new about the new nature writing in Granta’s 2008 collection titled The New Nature Writing? One answer would be “not much”’ (Stenning and Gifford, 1)…
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Changing the Climate of Writing
Our climate crisis is constitutively complicated, because rather than dividing culprits from innocents, it both implicates us and impacts on us, to…
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Performing Carbon (in the) Capital
It is rush hour in Liverpool Street Station. Hiding behind a copy of my newspaper I am trying to record a conversation between lobbyists…
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The Thoughts in our Head: A World
The early years of the twenty-first century have seen—among its various issues and events—the beginnings of a global assimilation of the recognition…
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Digital Metaphors: Editor’s Introduction
Tao Lin’s recent novel Taipei (2013) is a fictional document of life in our current digital culture. The protagonist, Paul — who is loosely based on the author — is numb from his always turned on digitally mediated life, and throughout the novel increases his recreational…
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An Ontology of Everything on the Face of the Earth
John Carpenter’s 1982 film, The Thing, is a claustrophobic sci-fi thriller, exhibiting many hallmarks of the horror genre. The film depicts a sinister turn for matter, where the chaos of the replicating, cancerous cell is expanded to the human scale…
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