Category Archives: Issues

New Issue: Plant Life

Stories of plants, people, and the earth they share

Plant Life is now available on Amazon!

Is there something strange about that person with a hundred house plants stacked up shelves high all around them? Or something enviable? Do plant people know something that others don’t? A walk in the quiet forest can be rejuvenating. A time lapse video of a house plant shows what could be mistaken for a house pet. The electrical signals of a tree play a beautiful symphony, which we pass by without ever hearing.

This volume of the London Reader digs deep into the roots that bind us to house plants, leafy neighbours, distant forests, and indeed the wider world. Our close relationship with plants opens up in this volume thanks to short stories, first-hand accounts, art, and poetry by Liz Ziemska, Leon Coleman, smintz, Steve Zisson, Rebecca Burton, Ulrike Durán Bravo, XH Collins, Toshiya Kamei, AN Grace, Fiona Pearson, Dominic Walker, John Gifford, Matt Gulley, Megan Kiekel Anderson, Christa Fairbrother, Gabriel Awuah Mainoo, Liz K Miller, and Daina Daugaviete.

Interviews with Vanessa Diffenbaugh, author of the New York Times-bestselling novel The Language of Flowers, and Hope Jahren, geobiologist and author of Lab Girl and The Story of More, ask about our relationships with plants and what plants can tell us about ourselves and about the world we share with them.

The authors and artists in this volume reach out to touch the leaves, flowers, and prickly spines all around us. They breathe in the jungle-thick and humid breath of plant life. And they ask, what are our lives like amongst plants—and more importantly, what would we be without them?


Plant Life is available on Amazon!

  • Read the volume in the PAPERBACK edition: US, UK
  • Collect the volume in the PREMIUM edition: US, UK
  • Download the volume in the KINDLE edition: US, UK

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Stories of Aliens and Disinformation cover

New Issue: UFOs

Stories of Aliens and Disinformation

What were those hovering lights in the night sky? What is at Area 51 anyway? Have we had visitors from another planet? But more importantly, what do these questions—and the answers we imagine—tell us about ourselves?

The stories in this volume of the London Reader walk the line between the unexplainable and downright deliberate disinformation. They show us reflections of our own faces in alien visitors, and they stand witness to the unidentified things, to lights flying in the dark desert sky, and to the attempts by government agencies to weaponize those stories for nefarious ends.

    In this collection, a mechanic meets an alien for the first time in a down-to-earth near-future short story from Arthur C Clarke and Philip K Dick award-winning author Gwyneth Jones. Best of British Science Fiction author Liam Hogan imagines space age first contact in his hard sci-fi story about a head of comms as she admins a message board at NASA. Two star-crossed friends take a roadtrip to Area 51 looking for evidence in a story by Stephen Near. Star Trek and Quantum Leap author Melissa Crandall creates a crash-landed spaceship for a single mother going through a separation. A deep-state cover-up conspiracy comes to heart-pounding life in a story from Reece Robertson. A classified report from the future by Hunter Spurlock reveals top secret methods used by intelligence agencies. And Yvette Viets Flaten takes us to the Area 51 air base she lived alongside in her youth, reimagined. In addition, the author of The Mammoth Book of Unexplained Phenomena, Roy Bainton details documented real-world accounts of unexplained flying objects and their connections to repeated accounts of real world Men in Black.

Interviews with Sarah Scoles, author of They Are Already Here, and Mark Pilkington, author of Mirage Men, trace the path of UFO stories from pop culture to deliberate government disinformation. Finally, the poetry and art in this collection breathes life into the conspiracies, imagining aliens in our skies and on our doorsteps.

Maybe, beyond all the alien memorabilia, government cover-ups, and stories of the unknown, there is someone out there who has seen the unexplained, who has experienced the unknown-unknowns. The truth is out there—only it’s hidden amongst the disinformation.


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London Lost

Stories in a Changing City

London is the city of Shakespeare’s Globe and the birthplace of grime. It is a city of divisions and a city of inequality. It is a city of strangers meeting like marbles in a machine. It is a city packed with pointless jobs at the end of long, cramped commutes. A city stuffed with box rooms, damp and draughty shared accommodations, where strangers share meals standing shoulder-to-shoulder in tight kitchens. London is also the most visited English-language tourist destination. London is a city of millions of long-term and short-term Londoners. A city of royalty, of Lords and Ladies, and a city of landowners and squatters. But London is ever changing.

London Lost features stories, poetry, and art about London and Londoners by Liam Hogan, Morgan Parks, Natasha Bonfield, Rob McClure Smith, Maroula Blades, Alex Zalben, SA MacLeod, Ethan O’Connor, Robin Cantwell, Madeleine McDonald, Janina Aza Karpinska, Barbara Saunders, Susie Aybar, Ruth Holzer, Maija Haavisto, Maximilian Damico, Nick Sweeney, David Winston, Karen Boissonneault-Gauthier, Sasha Saben Callaghan, and Mark Anthony Jarman. In addition Ashley Hickson-Lovence, author of The 392, speaks about capturing a city in fiction.

This volume of the London Reader is our complicated love note to the city we call home: to our packed commutes, to our thin walls and our neighbours on the other side, and yes, even to the tourists standing on Oxford Street, or on the wrong side of the escalator. This volume, like London itself, is more than the sum of its parts. London is a complex mess of tube lines and interconnected stories, but it’s also so much more than that.

London is anyone. London is everyone.

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Stories of Storms and Survival cover

BAD WEATHER

As we were compiling this issue, the West Coast of North America was hit by record-breaking floods wiping out all road access to one of Canada’s largest cities and the country’s largest port, the fourth largest in North America. Just months before, the same part of Canada saw forest fires and record-breaking hot temperatures under a deadly heat dome that killed over 1,400 people and more than a billion marine animals. As extreme weather comes with increasing frequency, more communities are finding themselves struggling for survival. 

The bad weather is here. And it’s only getting worse.

Bad Weather: Stories of Storms and Survival

The stories, poetry, and art in this volume take us head-first into the bad weather that has torn apart towns, submerged cities, scorched mountains, thawed new lands, and left us wondering where home really is.

Inspired by evacuating five times during the Black Summer bushfires in Australia, Elizabeth Walton tells the story of a woman finding hope after escaping the fires. An outsider meteorologist is ostracised when her weather reports don’t bring the weather her community wants in a short story by Tamar Weiss-Gabbay (translated from Hebrew by Jessica Cohen, the winner of the 2017 Booker Prize); and Richard Leise takes us to the bottom of a deep-sea trench where submarine explorers find more than expected.

This volume also turns toward a future to strive for with a story by the award-winning founders of the burgeoning solarpunk movement, Andrew Dana Hudson and Adam Flynn, where a wild community threatened by state forces and a catastrophic hurricane forges a new path of resistance. A survivor helo pilot searches for the origins of mysterious stones on a thawed Antarctica in a story by Paul McAuley—the Philip K Dick, Arthur C Clarke, John W Campbell, and British Fantasy Award-winning author of Fairyland, featured in the SF Masterworks imprint.

In their flash nonfiction, Amy Bee recounts her own experiences with recent California wildfires, and Karin Hedetniemi describes her life-long encounters with lightning at times of distress. Pinny Bulman, Annalise Torcson, Tom Daley, Rebecca Dunn, and Aishwarya Suresh Khale navigate us through stormy weather with poetry exposing our inner lives as the rains beat down outside. This volume also features striking art of the brewing storm by Clari Netzer, Mike Edwards, and Cynthia Young.

This collection features an interview with David Suzuki, the long-established science broadcaster, academic, and author, as well as an interview with Susan Conley, the award-winning author of Elsey Come Home and Landslide. 

The bad weather is here. And it’s only getting worse. The authors within offer us visions of a flooded world and of a world on fire, but also of a better future. Where do we go from here? The choice is yours.

Print and electronic subscriptions
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To read a previous issue, donate an amount of your choice, and receive a download link to the PDF:

The London Reader is a cooperative magazine. Your donation supports the writers, artists, and collaborators who made the issue.

Murder or Mystery?

Stories of Life and Death

The human mind has always tried to make sense of life and its mysteries.

This is perhaps no more true than when we’re surrounded by clickbait and news bites. In a chaotic world of disasters and pandemics, we long to read a story that comes to a conclusion, where the hidden danger is revealed, and where we can finally rest easy knowing how to avoid it—until the next body turns up

This volume of murder and mystery will pull you in, have you asking who did it, and leave you an ending to ponder. The collection features the moving story of a missing boy by Mark Hood, where the old ways of a rural community reach out to the magic of the bees; a crime story by Lee Conrad of a small lake-side community struck by a years-long drought and the deadly secrets hidden just below the surface; a story by the award-winning Tristan Marajh where a trophy hunter has gone missing following internet outrage; and Paulene Turner takes us on a search through Edwardian London, from Baker Street to the East End, as Dr Watson and one Irene Adler track down the missing detective in her original novella,Too Many Sherlocks.

This volume also includes an interview with Deepa Anappara, the award-winning author whose novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, was named as one of the best books of the year by the New York Times and the Washington Post; as well as an interview with Elly Griffiths, the award-winning author of twenty-seven books who has appeared in the Sunday Times Bestsellers chart 19 times. 

Throughout the short stories and interviews, this volume also presents flash mysteries in just a page or two that includes the story of a mind-bending search for missing characters after the mysterious death of an author by Jeff Noon, the award-winning author of the critically-acclaimed and cult-classic novel Vurt and the metafictional Nyquist Mysteries series; a death in the workplace where words are both stolen and have the power to kill by Liam Hogan, who’s been previously included in Best of British Science Fiction and Best of British Fantasy collections; next, the horror-podcast author featured on both Creepy and The Other Stories, Georgia Cook, takes us to a dinner party hosted by a mystery aficionado who goes too far; Jennifer Shneiderman entraps us with a psychic who may be the only way to connect with a lost loved one; and finally, Jessie Seigel sends us a “Message in a Bottle” from a most notorious inmate of a historic quarantine island.

Alongside the short fiction, this volume also features the enigmatic artwork of Margriet Pronk, Rufus Krieger, Oleksandr Balbyshev, and Chris Aerfeldt—artists from across Europe who’ve been exhibited around the world and featured in collections by Saatchi

With the cover closed, you’ve earned a moment’s peace, knowing you’ve maybe made sense of the mysteries around us, until 

The next story begins…

Print and electronic subscriptions
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If you prefer a mobile reader, like Kindle, first, get the Kindle app:

Once you have the app, or if you already have a Kindle device, check out the free trial of the London Reader with one click in the Amazon store:

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The London Reader is a cooperative magazine. Your donation supports the writers, artists, and collaborators who made the issue.

Dreams of the Moon Cover

Dreams of the Moon

Lunar stories of our past and future

Since before even the first words were written, the cosmic pull of the Moon has captivated humanity. It has shaped our myths, our night lives, our songs, our symbols, and indeed, our stories.

Arrive on a Moon colony under revolt against its corporate owners. Befriend a strange, yellow-eyed hound. Witness the divine meeting of Beninese celestial spirits. Uncover a suspicious murder following the 1969 Moon landing. Take a weightless tourist trip to the lunar surface. Feel the call of the tides under the Moon’s spectral glow.

This issue of the London Reader explores the Moon—both its effect on our lives and our longing for it—through short stories of our past and future from Paulene Turner, Matt Slaybaugh, Amy B Moreno, Maria Donovan, Nathan Alling Long, Sarah Oluwatomi Michaels, Pippa Gladhill, Emma Raymond, and Magdalena Stefanni.

The collection includes a special extended interview with Chris Hadfield—the former commander of the International Space Station, YouTube sensation, and author of the forthcoming novel The Apollo Murders. It also features an interview with Susan Beth Pfeffer, the New York Times bestselling author of Life as We Knew It.

Rounding out the issue is poetry and art exploring our intimate relationship with the Moon by Alison Burns, Dominic Weston, Finola Scott, Ruswa Fatehpuri, S Rupsha Mitra, Sait Mingü, Felicia Simion, Roger Leege, Gemma Campbell, and Susan diRende—including a poem by Lisa Rosenberg, the former space program engineer and poet laureate, and poems by one of Italy’s most celebrated contemporary poets, Chandra Livia Candiani, translated to English for the first time by Roy Duffield and Elisabetta Taboga.

Dreams of the Moon seeks to find the place that the Moon holds in our imaginations, in our hopes, and in our fears. The Moon has shaped our past and continues to shape our future. What now does the Moon mean to us, and how will the stories we tell about the Moon today shape our future on its surface?

Print and electronic subscriptions available now on Patreon!

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If you prefer a mobile reader, like Kindle, first, get the Kindle app:

Once you have the app, or if you already have a Kindle device, check out the free trial of the London Reader with one click in the Amazon store:

Do you live outside of these areas? Get the PDF of the latest issue free on Patreon.

To read a previous issue, donate an amount of your choice, and receive a download link to the PDF:

The London Reader is a cooperative magazine. Your donation supports the writers, artists, and collaborators who made the issue.

Raves & Resistance Cover Image

Raves & Resistance

Counterculture Stories

High in a volcano mountain-crater, a woman emerges from her clothes and slips into a festival lake and into a new moment. A punk show brings together the pierced bodies and studded minds of young radicals in a slam dance of social rejection and self discovery. A former revolutionary bomber is exposed by a more recent tragedy. An artist from 1960s Moscow looks for an audience outside the legacy of East and West. A student of the protests against the Vietnam War remembers the National Guard helicopter dropping tear gas as her final exam.

All culture begins first as counterculture. The new always arises as a rejection of the old. What is known, what is possible, is always discovered by people who push at its limits. Revelry and rebellion explore new social territory and leave cultural paths for others to follow.

This issue of the London Reader features counterculture stories by award-winning author Ewan Morrison; the Arthur C Clarke and Philip K Dick Award-winner Gwyneth Jones; the notable Patty Somlo; Peter Gallagher; the famed Russian and Hollywood filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky; Vicki Derderian; and Stephen O’Donnell. Its pages are also filled with words, poetry, and art by Kathryn Paulsen, Mark Kirkbride, Roy Duffield, Allison Whittenberg, Bryon MacWilliams, Lucia Galloway, Lorette C Luzajic, Tim Fowler, Montina Guiry, Sean Christopher Ward, Calvin Lai, and Bertone Studio, by Michiyo & Eduardo. Finally, the creative work in this volume is joined by interviews with James St. James, iconic television personality and author of Party Monster; Cat Marnell, former party-girl and New York Times bestselling-author of the memoir, How to Murder Your Life; and Ayelet Waldman, respected essayist and author of A Really Good Day. They open up about pushing back, setting trends, and seeing the world change around them.

The revolution is in every party, every festival, every political rally, every protest, and indeed, every place where people come together and connect outside the old architecture of state and capital. The stories in this volume of the London Reader are about people finding those moments of rebellion—whether small and personal in music and festivals, or big and revolutionary—and forging brave new paths into the future.

Print and electronic subscriptions available now on Patreon!

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The London Reader is a cooperative magazine. Your donation supports the writers, artists, and collaborators who made the issue.

Over the Cliff

Travel Stories from Europe Beyond Brexit

“There is no need for a passport when you arrive in Melilla from Spain. This is Spain!” says the officer. 
“And when I go through the fence?”
“That would be a different matter,” he says, looking uncomfortable. As an afterthought, he adds, “You cannot use euros beyond the fence!”

Over the white cliffs of Dover, Europe is moving on without the United Kingdom. This volume visits the continent’s high mountain roads, small city streets, and new borders through travel writing, short fiction, and poetry. These travel stories from Europe beyond Brexit will make you sigh with content, gasp with surprise, pause with reflection, and laugh with delight.

This collection includes stories by Mark Anthony Jarman, Coreen Grant, Ewan Morrison, Andriana Minou, Billy Letford, Alex Russell, Renee C Winter, Kieron Blake, and Ian McKenzie. They are joined by the poetry of Katrina Dybzynska, Timothy Dodd, VC McCabe, Susanna Lang, Deborah Tyler-Bennett, and Peter David Goodwin as well as artwork from Monsie, Christopher McColl, and Ann Marie Sekeres. This volume also features interviews with the editor of the Wild Women anthology, Open Book’s Mariella Frostrup; the international-bestseller travel author, Sara Wheeler; and one of most respected travel writers, Pico Iyer.

With Brexit, the borderless map of Europe has become a little bit smaller. But for Brits, their backyard is now a whole lot smaller. Yet travel too is changing with increasing emissions and the climate crisis. Jet planes are out; trains and electric vehicles are in. Novelty international holidays are going; longer exchanges are here to stay. And “that is the essence of travel writing,” explains Mariella Frostrup. The travel stories in this volume take us out our front door, over the cliffs of Dover, and into a new day.

Print and electronic subscriptions available now on Patreon!

How to read the latest issue FREE
Sign up to Patreon to check out the latest issue in PDF.

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To read a previous issue, donate an amount of your choice, and receive a download link to the PDF:

The London Reader is a cooperative magazine. Your donation supports the writers, artists, and collaborators who made the issue.

Cyberpunk in 2020

Science Fiction from Dystopian Moment to Sustainable Future

Check out Cyberpunk in 2020…

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It’s 2020—now where’s my flying car?

Pat Cadigan, a founder of the cyberpunk literary movement who is interviewed in this volume, famously answered, “That’s not the future we promised you. We promised you a dark technological dystopia. How do you like it?” It’s 2020, and the dark technological dystopia has arrived. 

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The fiction in this volume takes a look at the dystopian state of the world and dares to imagine an optimistic alternative, planting seeds of hope and drawing on solarpunk themes of a habitable future powered by renewable energy, networked-collaboration, and repaired technology. Like us, these stories stand at a crossroads between climate collapse and a radically reshaped sustainable future. The dystopia envisioned by 1980s cyberpunk authors has arrived. Will we continue down this path to self destruction, or do we dare envision a better future?

This volume features a collection of multi-award-winning cyberpunk authors who move the genre away from the 80s action movie aesthetic of bakelite guns and neon-lit street races and into our increasingly networked existence facing ecological collapse.

Stories from Nebula Award-winning authors Ken Liu, James Patrick Kelly, and Cat Rambo expose the pervasiveness of the internet as it intrudes into our most private and tragic moments. Arthur C Clarke Award-winners Gwyneth Jones and Lauren Beukes offer optimistic visions of the ways technology can connect us. This volume also features stories, minifiction, and poetry from Matt Bryden, Katie Harrison, Anthony Lapwood, Rebecca Lee, Rosaleen Lynch, Syd Shaw, and Paige Elizabeth Wajda who shine the light of their screens on this dark moment, looking for the loose strands that connect us together. Art by Pavlo Baiandin, Janusz Orzechowski, Sergey Osipov, and Harry Purnama display views of the dark street-scapes of the 21st century and glimpses of how our imagination and connections to each other can offer us a way out.

This volume also includes interviews with visionary author and Hugo, Arthur C Clarke, Locus, and Seiun Award-winner, Pat Cadigan and the novelist and principal writer for the upcoming and long-awaited game Cyberpunk 2077, Jakub Szamałek. They reflect on our dystopian moment and provide their views of where we go from here while Szamałek also answers what is cyberpunk in 2077.

The writing in this volume brings us up to date from the cyberpunk of the past. It attempts to debug the interconnected nature of the internet-driven world we now live in. It springs from our fears of a climate catastrophe while at the same time offers us an alternative vision. The future that the cyberpunk authors of the 80s warned us of is here. The dark technological dystopia is only getting worse. Social media is disrupting democracies, and the climate is collapsing. If we don’t act now, there will be no future. But it’s not too late; there is still hope. The choice is ours.

Check out Cyberpunk in 2020…

Part of the proceeds from this issue supports GiveDirectly. GiveDirectly is a charitable organization that sends donations immediately and directly to those most in need. Find out more at givedirectly.org

Cover of Our Time in Quarantine

Our Time in Quarantine

Stories and Poetry from the Lockdown

In quarantine, almost everything has changed—but it has changed for all of us, all at once. As difficult as isolation is, we all share this moment. We are connected the world-over like during no global calamity that has come before. And our stories can help us navigate this pandemic in this moment. They can help us understand it through other people’s eyes. And they can help us remember how it has affected everyone’s lives.

In these stories, a magical clock that last chimed during the Spanish flu is uncovered; neighbours learn everything about each other through their facing windows; one woman’s quarantine feels oddly like a house cat’s; and ghosts of the past come to dinner when no one else can. The stories in this issue were all composed this year. They sprang from the experiences and imaginations of almost twenty different authors grappling with the pandemic.

This issue presents enchanting and affirming short stories from Yvette Viets Flaten, Emma McKee, DC Van Schaick, Amy Lord, Anna McCarthy, Coles Lee, Miriam Huxley, Gabrielle Mullarkey, Douglas W Milliken, and Rekha Valliappan. It includes moving and inspiring poetry by Victoria Fifield, Nancy Cook, Gerard Sarnat, Katrina Dybzynska, Ronda Piszk Broatch, Jen Karetnick, and Anvesh Jain, as well as art from Ann Marie Sekeres, Brenda Mann Hammack, Laisve Rose, and Leo Wijnhoven. This issue also features interviews with the multi-award-winning author Namwali Serpell, whose first novel, the intergenerational epic, The Old Drift has been called “extraordinary, ambitious, evocative, dazzling” by Salman Rushdie; and with Phumlani Pikoli, the author and multidisciplinary artist who’s been cited as an “urgent new voice in South African fiction”.

The work of these authors and artists all bear witness to the greatest health crisis of our times. Through stories, we are deciding what is essential to our lives, we are figuring out what the phrase “the new normal” really means, and we are discovering, we’re all in this together.

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