The first installment of a three-part serialisation of Alasdair Gray's new play, The Comedy of Fleck: a modern imitation of Goethe's Faust.

"I was fourteen in 1949 when the BBC Third Programme celebrated the bicentenary of Goethe’s birth. In a fortnight of talks and dramatisations it presented Marlowe’s Dr Faustus (which partly inspired Goethe’s play) and operas by Gounod and Berlioz that Goethe’s play had inspired. Over several nights it broadcast a complete translation, by Louis MacNeice, of Goethe’s Faust’s five acts. I at once bought a Penguin translation of Goethe’s Faust Part 1 and 2 by Philip Wayne, and in the coming years bought Bayard Taylor’s and John Anster’s Victorian translations for a few shillings in second hand shops. Later my friend Archie Hind lent me Thomas Mann’s 20th century novel on the same theme – the theme of how much creative energy has an evil source..."

An extract from Regi Claire's new novel, Marlene.

"I never played with dolls except to execute them. I had heard grown-ups talk of hangings in low, secret voices – in those days the death penalty was still very much a fact of life. It was during my last week at infant school, just before the summer holidays, when I arrived home one lunchtime to find the wireless on at full volume, reporting an execution. They were all listening to it: Hamish lounging on the sofa, my mother through in the kitchen where she was frying some mince, Audrey at the table behind her, picking up ladders in one of her precious, fully-fashioned silk stockings..."

A new poem by David Knowles.

"It lurks in the corners
of old outbuildings, field-stones piled
by great-grandfathers who knew why –
the mortar that held them fast
washed out by storms
and the price of lamb..."

ARCHIVED ARTICLES

Empty Bottles Dexter Petley

The Bed Angela Morgan Cutler