Ben Wilkinson

There are many good literary magazines out there, but Dublin's The Stinging Fly is a particularly admirable project: since its inception in 1998, it has strived not only to provide a much-needed platform for the short story, but dedicates itself to providing space for work by new and emergent writers, alongside poems and fiction by established writers as varied as Simon Armitage, Fiona Sampson and Bernard O'Donoghue. It's also a handsomely produced publication, with a glossy cover showcasing the work of a new photographer each issue, and the magazine combines this professional look and feel with quality new fiction, poetry and reviews, as well as unique features such as 'First Passions', where a writer, publisher or literary agent describes their first encounters with, and their beginnings of love for, language and literature. The current issue, then (pictured above), includes song lyrics by Paul Muldoon, exciting new poetry and short stories, and reviews of poetry

So it’s finally arrived, ready to download at the price of your choosing, and I’ve left the ‘publication’ of my views on the new Radiohead album a bit later than most bloggers (and indeed, newspapers). You might see this as an accidental act of defiance against The Daily Telegraph ’s seemingly anonymous writer , who, as a self-proclaimed champion of paid reviewers for paper publications (shame he blogs too; quite the moral conundrum), states that: ‘One advantage of being paid for your opinion is that you can take some time to work out what it is.’ I wouldn’t say that was necessarily the case, however, as a glance at The Guardian ’s Alexis Petridis’s review of the album , a mere two days after its release (bearing in mind no promo editions of the album were mailed out to music journos), reveals. ‘A five star review’, asserts the headline, followed by Petridis stating that the album ‘may represent the strongest collection of songs Radiohead have assembled for a decade’, in just the sort

It's been a long time since I posted on Deconstructive Wasteland, and it's largely (if not entirely) to do with my complete lack of internet connection. But now I've started studying on the Writing MA at Sheffield Hallam I have access to their ample IT facilities, so I can do more than check emails while perched on a stool in a charging internet cafe. Hence this brief post. If you're reading this, then, thanks for returning after a month of complete inactivity. This week, two things I've written have appeared online: first, a review of Tim Turnbull's collection, Stranded in Sub-Atomica , is up on Todd Swift's blog Eyewear , and second, my choice for poem of the month at the Philip Larkin Society's site is up, 'As Bad as a Mile' . Aside from that, I'm loving being back in Sheffield, and amid sorting out everything in my new place I've started writing critical perspectives of contemporary authors for the British Council, the first of which