Q&A: Robin Sloan on Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Robin Sloan, author of Litro’s current Book Club pick, tells us how the idea for the novel came from a tweet.
The Mystery Lady of Gladstone’s Library – Short Story Competition
The UK’s only residential library (doesn’t that just sound brilliant? A library you can sleep in?) is running a short story competition as part of the library’s first ever literary ...
“Mystery” Photo Competition Winners
Impossible architecture, spooky stories and fabulous fairytales all feature in the winning photos in our “Mystery” themed photo competition.
Litro London Walk: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Camden
Explore the London haunts the great German thinkers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on our London walk, designed by Marx expert Heiko Khoo.
An Epic Project: Interview with Richard House on The Kills
Litro contributor Richard House tells us about his four-novel series The Kills, a political thriller and epic literary project that’s set to be one of the literary events of the ...
New £15,000 Essay Prize Announced
A new award for essay writing with a £15, 000 first prize has been announced. Named in honour of the master of the English essay, the William Hazlitt Essay Prize ...
A Moment of Weakness: the Finished #LitroStory
Last week we ran a literary experiment on Twitter. We asked our followers to write a collective story, one tweet at a time. Novelist Russ Litten wrote the first line ...
#litrostory: The Story So Far…
This is the #litrostory so far, a collective fiction being told one tweet at a time between Tuesday 26th February and midnight on Tuesday 5th March. Check the #litrostory hashtag ...
Calling All Performance Poets!
Litro is expanding and to celebrate the launch of our LitroTV channel on YouTube we are running an exciting competition dedicated to the word that is spoken, uttered, shouted or ...
Short Stories: New World Fairy Tales by Cassandra Parkin
The stories in this debut collection are familiar: a beautiful outcast taken in by seven dwarves, a girl with a long plait of hair, a woman going three times to ...
Alison Moore loves Sherwood Andersons Adventure
Kate Tempest’s angry, heartfelt, sing-song performance style and allusive, pulsating writing come together to create poetry that’s literary, musical and mesmerising. We talk to her about her love of hip ...
AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers
It’s an exciting time for African science fiction, marked most recently by the release of StoryTime’s ‘AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers’, a short story collection edited by Zimbabwean writer ...
Magic: An Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane
A good occult story doesn’t require the reader to believe in the occult. I can be scared by Algernon Blackwood without believing in ghosts, or get a chill down my ...
Tania Hershman: Author of My Mother Was an Upright Piano
Jerusalem. It’s a city I lived in from 1994-2009, the bulk of my adult life. It was really the first place I chose to be home, rather than having that ...
Short Stories: Tea at the Midland by David Constantine
In David Constantine’s short story “Asylum”, a therapist asks a patient to look in a mirror and describe herself. The mirror is “a lovely thing, face-shaped and just the size ...
Robert Lloyd Parry on M. R. James’ Ghost Stories
In the run-up to our Ghosts issue, which will go online on Halloween, Litro Lab talks to actor Robert Lloyd Parry about bringing the tales of the ghost ...
Short Stories: The Stone Thrower by Adam Marek
The stories in Adam Marek’s new collection are addictively off-kilter. They explore strange presents and even stranger futures: nano-suits, interspecies cloning, superhero dictators and earthquake-inducing seizures all make an appearance. ...
Five Ghost Stories that Scared M. R. James
Today marks 150 years since the birth of the master of the ghost story, Montague Rhodes James. In the century since they were first published, James’s stories have never been ...
The Poetics of the Motorway
Leave the slip road, nudge out into the slow lane between a Norbert Dentressangle lorry and a Volvo estate towing a caravan with mint-green go-faster stripes. Wherever that slip road ...
Nonfiction: Alain de Botton on Work
A retrospective of Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work and Status Anxiety as a tie-in to Litro #115: Work.