Review by Jonathan Taylor of "Walter Benjamin's Ark" by John Schad

 

“The Angel of History,” philosopher Walter Benjamin claims, is witness not to a “chain of events” but rather “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage … in front of his feet.” No doubt this “pile of debris ... [which] grows skyward” consists mainly of human wreckage, the dead; but, as John Schad’s weird and hallucinatory new book, Walter Benjamin’s Ark, demonstrates, it also includes language, texts, the very ability of human beings to communicate. The catastrophe that is mid-twentieth-century history, in particular, reduced texts to a “huge-and-disorderly-heap-of-unsorted BOOKS, a kind of rubble,” such that “words had been muddled,” often in disastrous ways. 

Walter Benjamin’s Ark brilliantly picks its way through that rubble, trying to salvage something from the cataclysm. It pieces together an upcycled collage of historical fragments, philosophical and literary texts, impossible conversations, in order to tell the imagined story of Walter Benjamin’s son, Stefan, and his journey as a deportee from England during the Second World War. In 1940, Stefan was forced onto the HMT Dunera and deported, ultimately, to Australia – along with 2000 other “enemy aliens,” some of whom were devoted Nazis, but the majority of whom were Jewish refugees.

Herein lies the first sign of the disintegration of language: the disastrous collapse of the words “German,” “Nazi,” “enemy,” “alien,” “immigrant” and “Jew” into one another. Many other instances of linguistic collapse and miscommunication follow: a Jewish author’s unfinished novel is discovered by the British soldiers on board, and thrown into the Mersey; the letters between Stefan and his mother are lost; Stefan loses touch with his father, Walter; a manuscript Walter claims to have in his suitcase (“a manuscript more valuable than I am,” he says) disappears on his death; his final letter to his son is mysteriously destroyed; a Jewish poet, Gertrud Kolmar, is silenced – initially by being forced to work in a German munitions factory, and subsequently by deportation to Auschwitz. 

The deportation of the Jews, whether to Auschwitz or to Australia, is itself facilitated by failed communication. As Schad points out, on 8 August 1942, the World Jewish Congress sent a telegram from Geneva to New York warning about the Final Solution. “This telegram,” Schad notes, “would, initially, be dismissed as a falsehood.” As Schad suggests, miscommunication and misreading can have deadly consequences: excommunication all too easily slips into extermination. 

There is still hope, though, according to Schad: “in all its desperation,” Stefan’s situation, is “not devoid of hope.” And Schad’s quasi-biography itself represents an act of hope, in its piecing together of a new kind of language, its revelling in Joycean-Woolfian streams of consciousness, its staging of impossible dialogues,  its textual and generic contortions, its bizarre juxtapositions of slapstick with horror. After the war, Stefan became an antiquarian bookseller; and towards the end of Walter Benjamin’s Ark, he is seen straightening the books with “the gentlest touch,” as if rescuing them from the rubble, “lest they topple, fall, and crash” once more. Texts, language, communication persist, just about, and Stefan is doing his bit to restore them, saving them from the wreckage of war. 

About the reviewer
Jonathan Taylor’s most recent books are A Physical Education (Goldsmiths, 2025) and Scablands and Other Stories (Salt, 2023). He directs the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. 

You can read more about Walter Benjamin's Ark by John Schad on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Paul Taylor-McCartney of "The Subtle Art of Short Fiction" ed. Isabelle Kenyon

 

This is a concise, well-focused companion for creative writers who already understand the fundamentals of crafting short fiction and now want to work at the level of nuance, treating it as a form defined by compression and consequence. The emphasis is not on shortcuts or formula, but on the deliberate choices that allow a story to suggest a larger world while remaining tightly controlled.

One of the anthology’s strengths is the authority and range of its contributors. Essays and writing exercises from Daisy Johnson, Matt Wesolowski, Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Sarah Schofield, Jonathan Taylor, S. J. Bradley, Mahsuda Snaith, David Hartley and Farhana Shaikh offer a multi-perspectival account of craft (including an illuminating introduction by Paul March-Russell). The variety of approaches prevents the collection from becoming prescriptive. Instead, it reads as a series of intelligent, practice-based reflections on what short stories can achieve and how they generate their distinctive force.

The technical focus is consistently strong. Several chapters attend to subtext and micro-tension, showing how emotional pressure often gathers not through explanation, but through what remains withheld and unresolved. The discussion of sensory minimalism is equally effective, returning to the difficult question of when to render detail vividly and when to imply, allowing the reader to complete the image. Structure is treated as an area for experimentation rather than compliance, with contributors encouraging alternative narrative frameworks and more considered thinking about pacing, revelation and the placement of the final turn. 

Crucially, each chapter includes helpful writing prompts and exercises that bridge literary theory and creative practice. These are not incidental add-ons, but carefully designed invitations to test ideas on the page, and to translate conceptual discussion into specific decisions about language, scene and shape. I have recently returned to the short story form myself, so engaging with this book has been both timely and beneficial in deepening my own understanding of the genre, while also offering practical stimulus for new work.

Isabelle Kenyon’s editorial hand keeps the collection coherent while allowing each voice its own texture, and it is the gravitas and insight of those voices that gives the anthology its remarkable depth. The result is an anthology that sharpens attention, both to the craft of short fiction and to the pleasures of reading it closely. This is a thoughtful, highly engaging and genuinely useful book, and one that rewards return, particularly for writers intent on refining control, precision and resonance.

About the reviewer
Dr Paul Taylor-McCartney is a writer, post-doctoral researcher and lecturer. His academic and creative interests include dystopian literature, Queer studies, children’s fiction and initial teacher education. His poetry, short fiction and scholarly articles have appeared in a wide range of print and electronic media, and recent fiction titles he worked on as commissioning editor have won regional readers’ and publishers’ awards. His debut children’s novel, Sisters of the Pentacle, was published by Hermitage Press (2022), and his first non-fiction title, Cornwall Uncharted: Mapping Cornwall’s Queer History of Concealment, Culture and Creativity, is shortly to be published by The History Press (June 2026).

You can read more about The Subtle Art of Short Fiction on Creative Writing at Leicester here.