The Editors

Kazuo Ishiguro, who has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote in the London Review of Books in 1985: 'The British and the Japanese may not be particularly alike, but the two races are exceedingly comparable. The British must actually believe this, for why else would they be displaying such a curious desperation to deny it? No doubt, they sense that to look at Japanese culture too closely would threaten a long-cherished complacency about their own.'

'Part of John Ashbery’s charm,' Mark Ford wrote in the LRB in 1989, 'is his self-deprecating uncertainty about the whole business: "Some certified nut/Will try to tell you it’s poetry."’ The LRB published more than fifty poems by him, the first of them in 1995 (a late start for us, nearly forty years after his first collection and twenty after Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror). 

Short fiction isn’t really something that the LRB publishes, except when it does. In the latest issue, for example, there’s a 274-word work by Diane Williams, the 99th item that we’ve tagged in our online archive as a story, though it could just as well be categorised as prose poetry. The same goes for Anne Carson’s ‘Euripides to the Audience’ (2002). In 1980 we carried an extract from an unpublished play by Noël Coward.

John Sturrock died yesterday. He wrote his first piece for the LRB, on Sherry Turkle's Psychoanalytic Politics, in its third issue, and was the paper's consulting editor from 1993. He will be greatly missed.

Perhaps we have only ourselves to blame. By awarding last year’s top prize to an underwater entry, and then publishing a watery cover one week into the contest, we were asking for it. There have been an unprecedented number of entries to this year’s #readeverywhere competition that feature pools, streams, rivers, lakes and seas. These readers seem to be forgetting something important: the London Review of Books isn’t waterproof.