The Narrative issue, Autumn 2021 from TANK Magazine.
Narrative collapse is everywhere – media is ever more atomised, and the tales politicians spin have less and less power to convince. It’s become clear that stories don’t work anymore, but what’s less certain is why we keep telling them anyway. In this issue, we chart the compulsion towards narrativisation in the face of a reality that makes less and less sense.
Oklou uncovers an eternal Spring in Paris, while Joanna Pope dives into the encyclopediac online world of the Aesthetics Wiki. Meena Kandasamy considers the fate of the novel in an age of spectacle and Alice Hattrick writes on the fraught work of writing in “crip time”. Elsewhere in the issue, artist collective Shanzhai Lyric forge a poetry of replicas, Will Wiles on the cult of calling things cults, Justin E.H. Smith on Netflix narratology and fresh new fiction from Natasha Brown.
