Louie Conway

...is an Anglo-Irish freelance writer whose journalism and criticism has been published by Vanity Fair London, The British Journal of Photography, and various B2B and B2C publications in the print, design and drinks industries. His interests include literature, language, science, philosophy and politics.

Vanity Fair •

Checkout 19

Early in Checkout 19, the unnamed narrator describes how, as a schoolgirl, she tried to draw the face of an English teacher she admired in the back of her textbook. The result was unsatisfactory—“shameful”, in fact—and had to be effaced. She began scrawling over it with “tight little obliterating spirals,” before widening her hand’s orbit, sending the pen across page in “a wavy line that flew up into exuberant loops, throwing off the tightness of the tight spirals that were a kind of steel wool...
Vanity Fair •

No one writes about London like Dubliner Keith Ridgway

His 2012 novel Hawthorn & Child opened with an unsolvable shooting in Finsbury Park and spread into a broken web of narratives connecting the city’s criminals, police, recluses and perverts. It was moody and compelling, more or less plotless, and, according to a modest congregation of writers and critics, the best book published that year. Arriving nearly a decade later, A Shock is a story cycle that follows a cast of loosely connected characters around London’s southeast.
British Journal of Photography •

On Diversion

In the mid-20th century, a band of European avant-gardists began to interpret their cities as more than the functional by-products of society. These ‘psychogeographers’ aspired towards new ways of exploring urban environments which emphasised playfulness, wandering and spontaneity. Commuter channels and direct routes, they believed, were spatially and psychologically delimiting; to gain a fresh awareness of their environment, urban denizens must embrace creative and indirect ways of moving through it. They must, in short, value diversion...
Vanity Fair •

Review: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

What do the short stories of the 19th-century Russian masters have in common with the works of George Saunders? At first glance, not a lot. His are surreal, irreverent fables set in corporate wastelands and haunted dystopian theme-parks. Theirs are simple, classically structured, (mostly) realist tales about the frostbitten lives of farmers, peasants, schoolteachers and clerks. Saunders believes these older stories represent a “high-water period for the form”, but as a young writer in the ’80s...
Vanity Fair •

In a Berlin bookshop, two men reach for the same book...

In a Berlin bookshop, two men reach for the same book. One is Robert Prowe, a fiction writer lacking inspiration for his first novel. The other, slurring apologies and reeking of alcohol, claims he’s a writer too. Robert writes him off as an eccentric, but when their paths cross again, the man, Patrick Unsworth, shares a sensational story, claiming to have been employed as a ghostwriter for an oligarch turned critic of Putin who was recently found hanged. A fellow Brit alone in Berlin, Patrick...
Vanity Fair •

Pure Gold

The eight stories that make up John Patrick McHugh’s debut collection are set on a fictional island, called simply “the Island”, imagined to lie somewhere off the coast of County Mayo. That’s about all the fabulism readers of Pure Gold will be required to indulge, because the grieving, pining, callous, horny, depressed characters that populate its pages are both starkly relatable and searingly real. In “Bonfire”, the collection’s opening story, two young pyromaniacs find the consuming disorder
Vanity Fair •

Chapo Trap House: Socialism for the Extremely Online

The Chapo Trap House project was started by three friends—Will Menaker, Matt Christman and Felix Biederman—who met on Twitter and founded a low-budget podcast that offered a hard-left take on the run-up to the 2016 U.S. election. A flurry of early media attention suggested that their loose mix of satire and sincerity resonated with young progressives. Paste magazine anointed the trio as “Vulgar, Brilliant Demigods of the New Progressive Left”, and profiles in publications like the New Yorker and...
Vanity Fair •

Meaning Created: The Extraordinary Lives of Past Progressives

Sometime around 2005, eight co-workers at a Pennsylvania advertising agency received an unusual email. Instead of the latest advertising news, it contained five links to interesting things: a menu of creative delights from outside the industry. The sender was Maria Popova, an idealistic start-up employee trying to broaden her colleagues’ imaginative horizons. Today she is the sole creative force behind Brain Pickings: a website and newsletter that provides an ongoing “inventory for the good life...
Vanity Fair •

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin Rees

Several of the biggest names in science have stoically set about coaxing public attention away from daily news cycles and onto long-term issues. While political drama dominated February’s headlines and bestseller lists, the psychologist Steven Pinker calmly made the case for progress and reason in Enlightenment Now. As we fussed over state funerals and sport sponsorship deals in September, Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari laid down 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Stephen Hawking’s Brief Answers...
British Journal of Photography •

Overseas

Tillekens was born in Queens, New York, to parents who emigrated from rural Ireland. "Like so many Irish of their generation, they were seeking better economic opportunity," Tillekens explains. But Tillekens' own experience is a near reversal to that of her parents. As a recent graduate in post-recession America, she became jaded and restless. "I was jobless and dejected," she says. "I viewed my home city as hypercompetitive, hyperproductive, overpopulated...