HEAT Series 3 Number 15

The new issue of HEAT is here! Available now, Series 3 Number 15, offers writing from Glenn Bech, Chris Fleming, Harriet Armstrong, Isabella Trimboli, Hasib Hourani and Michal Tallo.

Opening the issue, Glenn Bech’s ‘Julius’, translated by Hazel Evans, continues our surprisingly extensive history of publishing Danish writers. In the late nineties and early aughts HEAT featured varied Danish perspectives from Pia Tafdrup, Solvej Balle, Peter Seeberg, Carsten Jensen and Christina Hesselholdt; more recently we have presented poetry by Marianne Larsen and fiction by Harald Voetmann. We welcome Glenn to our mini canon with a piece about the intensity of first love, written in ‘knækprosa’, or ‘snap prose’, that is at once epic and anecdotal, and rife with double meanings. It begins:

Julius, was the name of my first love
at summer camp
different rules applied, he & I were allowed
to hold hands
people smiled indulgently, called us ‘the couple’
‘the camp couple’
on my part, guilty as charged

Elsewhere in our pages, philosopher Chris Fleming, reflecting on his boyhood, writes about the power of childhood obsession and its relation to adult OCD: ‘the oddest of superstitions – a delusion simultaneously seen through and believed’. British writer Harriet Armstrong offers a short story about an analytical young woman preoccupied by a splinter. Essayist and critic Isabella Trimboli returns to our pages with her fiction debut ‘Miss Carousel’ – a surreal, gothic tale written under the spell of the late Hungarian-American writer Susan Taubes. Across three minimalist poems, Hasib Hourani peers into the dark corners of urban spaces – on the night bus, in underpasses, inside vents, under couches. And Slovak writer Michal Tallo’s story about a group of friends on a weekend away together sits somewhere between fever dream and reality.