The Mechanics' Institute Review: Issue 11

In its eleventh annual issue, The Mechanics' Institute Review continues to showcase the best work from Birkbeck's creative writing students, with new stories from award-winners Hari Kunzru and Alex Preston that complement these strong impressive voices. Teeming with life and energy, this compelling collection offers a remarkable range of styles, themes and settings. Beginning with a mushroom arm and ending with an inferno, in between you ll experience body-piercing in Paris, child prostitution in Korea and a war reporter s last battle, inhabit a drug-fuelled Dublin and an icebound world where voices are trapped in vials. In her introduction, Julia Bell celebrates the protean wildness of the short story and its ability to conjure lived existence, to stir, affect and challenge. Unlearn the logic and let these stories alert you to the experience of being alive, however strange, however wild.