The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Petroglyphs etched into desert varnish, Utah I've written about Weird Life by David Toomey for the May edition of The Literary Rev...

Lie awake at night even in our composed Britain and think about how the land about you is changing every hour, as surely as your own bod...

One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a...

Helen Silverman, whose graduate work included a study of the social organization and behavior of narwhals, describes as typical the followi...

Sitting after lunch we heard them outside, & on Sunday there they were again hanging in a quivering shiny brown black purse to Mrs Thom...

This changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one's sense of outer reali...

Mel Challenger is detained by flu in the family so is unable to take part in an event at the Bath Literary Festival today. I will be there ...

What had caught my eye in the heather was the zigzag, a pattern too clear to look natural. The shadows cast by bracken leaves have similar ...

photo: Guy Moreton 'It seems to me,' [Wittgenstein] will recall years later of these months, 'that I had given birth to n...

What draws me to these places is hard to define. The journey is part of the magic. The sea is endlessly, and wonderfully alive; unlike con...

Daily, our sense of time slowed, days expanded like a wing. The days were long in the best, high-summer sense; at night we put up storm shut...

I have put a version of  Hypnagogia  (which appears in Archipelago 5) online here . Andrew McNellie, the editor, prefaces edition 5 with thi...

In Nature Writing , a contribution to Archipelago 5 , Tim Dee quotes Vladimir Nabokov (1962): Reality is a very subjective affair. I can on...

Alain de Boton is right that our culture has become sentimental about nature . It's true, too, that we can experience awe by looking out...

A cloud in the sky suddenly lighted as if turned on by a switch; its reflection suddenly materialized on the water upstream, flat and floati...

Man might be more tolerable, less fractious and smug, if he had more to fear. I do not mean fear of the intangible, the suffocation of the...

The preface to Contours of climate justice ( pdf ) includes a note written in 1951 by Dag Hammarskjöld which, say the authors, show with p...

[Toby] shared the bathroom with six illegal Thai immigrants, who kept very quiet. It was said that the CorpSeCorps had decided that expellin...

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasu...

I imagine standing upon a Cambrian shore in the evening, much as I stood on the shore at Spitsbergen and wondered about the biography of lif...