Litro

A New Orleans landscape marked by weather, memory, and the long afterlife of Katrina. August 27th, 2005 “If you stay here, you will die,” The TV reporter says, flatly. I grimace, as I feel like he is talking directly to me. April 11th, 2008 I am in New Orleans, LA, USA, for the first time since Hurricane Katrina in an outdoor bazaar with vast vendors of local artists who set up under colorful tents around the gray concrete plaza.

A drought-struck island landscape for a story of grief, crossing, and return. April 2019 Grandpa died in April. He was very old. Life was hell, that’s what he used to say. A fire burned for  good. The funeral tomorrow, so soon, as was the way for Jews. I had to get home fast. Still in Greece,  in Ithaca, at the birthday party of an aunt on my mother’s side.

Part One: Mouse House “After you,” said Stuart, holding back a bright shock of gorse. The gate creaked a strange welcome and I stepped through. A smell of damp earth rose from mossy ground. High stone walls white with lichen enclosed a long orchard of trees laden with apples, some hunched low, others reaching skywards. “The walls keep the flock out,” said Stuart. “Our trees are mostly Bramley, some Pippin.” He bent down and rubbed a straggly runner.

This is an original English translation of the short story “Rabbia” first published in Italian in Rivista Cattedrale magazine in 2025. April 3 The last heron left the island yesterday. The Mandarin ducks and Canada geese have migrated. I haven’t seen a swan in weeks and the white peeking out of the rushes is that of the coots with their pointed beak and the frontal shields.

A woman moving through Denmark Hill and Coldharbour Lane finds that chance, memory, and place are harder to separate than they first appear. Even on Saturdays, Nina hurries by that alleyway. The back alley linking London’s Denmark Hill, the road for ever choked with ambulances for Kings’ Hospital, with Coldharbour Lane. A Mothercare bag, caught in the gusts from cars racing to Brixton, clings to her ankle. She kicks it free, and it twists, ghoul-like along the pavement.

From the Litro archive First published in Litro #97: East London, Louise Stern’s “Rio” returns as part of our Story Sunday archive strand — a story of youth, silence, danger, desire and the strange power of being watched. In Rio the velvety air felt easy and comfortable. We slept on Copacabana beach and our sandals were stolen by one of the bony, dark-skinned group in rags who had set up camp under the nearby palm trees ringed by bits of rubbish.

Litro Interviews Fiction / Crime / Politics / Craft From the archive The novelist and screenwriter speaks to Litro about Pleasantville, the political life of Houston, writing across fiction and television, and why the work has to come before the industry. Interview by Litro / Originally published 2015 Why this matters A writer thinking seriously about place, power and the discipline behind the page.

What’s more difficult than writing a good story? Writing good dialogue. Dialogue is an essential part of every writer’s arsenal. Get it right and it can do wonders for your novel or short story. Mess it up and it ends up a deadweight dragging the narrative down and taxing the reader’s patience. I have been agonizing over the quality of the dialogue in the novel I am working on right now. The first draft of my novel was generously peppered with dialogue.

Picture Credits: Ryan McGuire Agents and editors often say that they’re looking for a narrative with a compelling voice or a “voice driven narrative.” What does that mean? When agents talk about voice, they’re referring to the voice of a writer, an author’s voice. Voice is not just about style or a distinctive style, it is inseparable from the writing itself. Voice is a writer’s perspective of the world.

Future Archives AI / Authorship / Literary Culture Bookshops have always been engines of trust: places where judgement, taste and public attention meet. Photograph by Georg Eiermann / Unsplash. Essay After a season of AI allegations, prize anxiety and bookseller caution, a Future Archives essay on what still makes writing feel alive: trust, judgement, pressure and the human decisions left on the page. The literary question is not whether machines can produce sentences. They can.