HEAT 15

Series 3 Number 15 offers writing from Glenn Bech, Chris Fleming, Harriet Armstrong, Isabella Trimboli, Hasib Hourani and Michal Tallo.

Opening the issue, Glenn Bech's 'Julius', translated by Hazel Evans, continues HEAT magazine's surprisingly extensive history of publishing Danish writers. In the late nineties and early aughts HEAT featured varied Danish perspectives from Pia Tafdrup, Solvej Balle, Peter Seeberg, Carsten Jensen and Christina Hesselholdt; more recently the journal has presented poetry by Marianne Larsen and fiction by Harald Voetmann. Bech is introduced to this mini canon with a piece about

the intensity of first love, written in 'knkprosa', or 'snap prose', that is at once epic and anecdotal, and rife with double meanings. It begins:

Julius, was the name of my first love

at summer camp

different rules applied, he & I were allowed

to hold hands

people smiled indulgently, called us 'the couple'

'the camp couple'

on my part, guilty as charged

Also in this issue, philosopher Chris Fleming, reflecting on his boyhood, writes about the power of childhood obsession and its relation to adult OCD: 'the oddest of superstitions a delusion simultaneously seen through and believed'. British writer Harriet Armstrong offers a short story about an analytical young woman preoccupied by a splinter. Essayist and critic Isabella Trimboli returns to HEAT with her fiction debut 'Miss Carousel' a surreal, gothic tale written under the spell of the late Hungarian-American writer Susan Taubes. Ahead of his debut book released with Giramondo in September, Hasib Hourani peers into the dark corners of urban spaces across three minimalist poems on the night bus, in underpasses, inside vents, under couches. And Slovak writer Michal Tallo's story about a group of friends on a weekend away together sits somewhere between fever dream and reality.