Prose from Catherine Eisner, Neil Ferguson (read this story online), John Saul, Nick Sweeney.

Poetry from Lotte Kramer, Rosemary Norman, Donald Atkinson, Patricia Cherin, Lance Lee, Thomas Orszag-Land, J. Jason Mitchell, Alexis Lykiard, Clint Margrave, John Hartley Williams, Julian Stannard (read an extract online), Martin Cook, Susan de Sola, Michele Powles, Colin Will, Brian Daldorph, John Murphy, Angela Readman and Benedict Newbery.

Artwork from Jennifer-Kate McIntyre, Eleanor Taylor, Ken Cox, and Ron Sandford.

We’ve put our heads together and come up with a fantastic Christmas gift for your literary loved ones – Five back issues in a handsome Ambit bag!

It's the amazing Ambit Christmas Bundle!

[UPDATE! Our next posting of these will be on the 20th, so will not be with you by Christmas!] For the low low price of £25 (including postage!!!) you will receive five assorted Ambits from across our illustrious history in a beautiful Ambit bag. Great for just about anyone who can read, or likes pictures.

There’s Paypal clickable below, but you can also send us a cheque, or phone us to pay by card.

Buy it now!

Some information about the role:

The position is one day per week and is unpaid*. It will probably be on Thursdays, but we can be a little flexible on that point.

Duties of the position include (but are not limited to):
*  Opening post
*  Sorting submissions pile
*  Reading copy
*  Sending rejections to writers
*  Contacting successful writers
*  Formatting and typesetting copy
*  Proofreading
*  Posting copies of the issue to readers
*  Helping out at events

Basically the magazine is put together by an editorial team of three people including the assistant, so we all pretty much do a bit of  everything. As a quarterly magazine, it takes us three months to put together an issue; that would be the minimum time for the position to be filled, really. We won’t lock you in the basement if you get an amazing job offer a couple of months in and have to leave us, but we’re definitely looking for someone who is thinking of staying on medium-ish term.

If you’re interested please send us a letter or e-mail with your CV to the usual address, info@ambitmagazine.co.uk

Also note that there aren’t any other opportunities available, so speculative CVs looking for full time work, two-week internships or anything of that nature will be politely rejected. Reasonably politely. Sorry guys.

(*free tea and biscuits, though. Also, oftentimes there is cake.)

Buy it now!

Featuring:

Kevin Crossley-Holland / Astrid Chesney In the Window-Seat
Jack Moss Pencil and Crayon Drawings
Nigel Pantling Moon-landing
Alix Nathan MOVE
Myra Schneider Oranges
Geoff Nicholson / Michael Foreman QAWGOLDOF
Knute Skinner Ringing the Number
Myriam Frey / Orly Orbach Divine Intervention
Satyendra Srivastava Do It You Are In Charge
H. P. Tinker / Ken Cox Alice In Time & Space and Various Major Cities
Clare Thompson Mechanisms
Marcus Smith La Rhapsodie des bas quartiers
Joan Jobe Smith / Michael Foreman Bukowski Chugs Cheap Beer at the No-No a Go-Go
Gerda Mayer / Michael Foreman Love-life 1941
Reviews of Burnside, Harsent, Satyamurti, Liardet, Swann, Foyle, Perrin, Ondaatje, Phillips, Marriott and Ingram
Diana Hendry Cousins
William Peskett / Charles Shearer Confectionery
Edmund Prestwich / Michael Foreman Welwitschia Mirabilis
Gary Allen The Day John Lennon Died
Cat Roisseter The Violent Ordeals
Luke Salazar ICU
Dai Vaughan / Michael Foreman The Ship – A Riff on the Bob Dylan Lyric
Paul Bentley From Don
Joanna Ingham / Orly Orbach The Corpse Road
Robert Hamberger / Mireille Fauchon My Mother as Ingrid Bergman
Kaddy Benyon Mummy
Ron Sandford Portrait of Douglas Thompson

Here it is! Ambit 205! 96 pages of new voices, fresh perspectives, youthful zip, vim and vigour, piss and vinegar. And other youthful stuff. Come along to the launch in Kentish town on Thursday 21 July

Buy it now!

YOUTH ISSUE CONTENTS
Writers and artists denoted with an asterisk (*) are under thirty-five years of age

3   Michael Cunningham / Posy Simmonds Housewives’ choice
7   *Fraser Calderwood / *Orly Orbach Swap
14 *Hannah Carding Art Set
18 *Abi Curtis / Charles Shearer Purpose-built Town
22 Robin Ford / *David Fulford How I Became a Tree
25 Paul Groves / Mike Foreman Perplexity
28 *Eley Williams / *Mireille Fauchon  Of Seeping and Draining
32 Elizabeth Birchall Chill
34 *Sandra de Matos Art Set
39 *Sam Riviere That Sweet New Style
41 *Heather Phillipson A Dramatic Look Inside the Heart Makes for Interesting Television
44 Catherine Eisner / Ken Cox The Shadow on the Blind
57 *Liz Berry Foal
58 *Christopher Nield The Fortune Teller
61 Donna Pucciani Turbulence
62 *Joe Dresner Bris
64 *Abigail Parry Incubus
67 *Andrew F. Giles Piers Gaveston, Keeper of the Realm
68 Reviews: Neil Leadbeater, Sam Gardiner, Matthew Caley, Ramsay Nasr (Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer), Ruth Fainlight, Tim Liardet, Susan Wicks, Brian Aldiss, Lance Lee
74 *Helen Mort Frost
76 *Thomas Harnett O’Meara Art Set
80 *Edward Mackay The Abbat
82 *Paul Sweeten / Mike Foreman Prodigy
89 *Maxwell Minckler Her Pillow Is Too Small
91 *Kim Moore I want you to build me an island
92 *Chris Jackson The Gallery or The Seven Ages of Man
93 David Troupes Chasing Nieces at Dunham Massey
95 *Joseph J. Turrent Night-Run At Kitsbuhl
96 *Vidyan Ravinthiran A chair addresses Jackie Chan

And here’s Martin’s very first editorial:

And here’s what a computer makes of Martin’s scanned text.  I was going to correct it, but on consideration I rather like the cavalier approach it has taken with his carefully-formed prose. Perhaps sometime soon I’ll scan in an early piece from Burroughs, from when he was doing his cutup work.  Reassembled by machines? I’m sure he’d approve:

“Per hus travellers hnve had the exquisite experience of seeing s Iild
beer. For an Englishman, the surprise of seeing such sn sninsl Ielkin; slon;
by the side e! the rosd is i—euss sud the incinient stuck firlly in sy sihd.
For the hear it Iss quite otherwise. There Iss clearly no surprise and
no consequent pleasure. Plodding his Isy along the hillside, he took
shsolutely no notice of the hus 1osd’s excitmthehsvienr. Perlups he hunched
his shoulders n little hut he certainly didn’t look round or step, he just
pledded on to Iherever he Iss going in his intsrninnhle sssreh for honey.
Dsy by dsy, Is pied on: bus sttsr has crashes darn on us. Ie are struck
Iron in trout, behind, both sides, and fesr tinslly to be sqnsshod flat by
solething dreppifl plonk on top of us. These buses which ohtrude on us,

are the discordant opinions oi those about us and their divergent voices
are too obtrusive to he shrugged off, we have to sit up and listen to what
they have to say.

Ihat is more these scribes require us to take q¢g1Qn, lqngh by month
day by day, they present more causes, more problems about which (if we have
any social conscience at all, we are reminded) we must take decisions.
Ie must decide whether we should be marching to Aldermaston, weigh up the
claims of the various politicians, settle our minds about the smoking/Csmosr
scare and weigh up each day the rival soap claims.

Our problem is we find it impossible to make up our minds. Ie lack the
information, we lack the time, we lack above all the interest. Ie feel tired.
Listening to the partizsn of one side or the other, the way ahead seems
clear but we are easily confused by the counterblasts from the opposition
and we’ve forgotten those arguments presented to us earlier which would have
routed our present antagonist so completely.

we are apathetic. Vast numbers of our countrymen share the same vice.
“Apathy” – it is the cry of the gallant enthusiasts who are opinionated,
know what they want and are trying to carry it out. Ie hunch our shoulders
and plod on. Human beings in their buses have become too complex for us, we
are inclined to hope they’re rather boring. Ie doubt if there is s field
of activity worthy of our attention.

In this crisis, Art, that mysterious elusive human mystery, remains.
Its nature undetermined, its purpose undefined, yet its flashing beam illumines
the desert~of life. Moreover it’s appreciation is so individual, so personal
that every man can have an opinion as valuable as the next. Art allows us
to assert ourselves in a world where our individuality seems half submerged.
It is our honey and it is worth breaking into a trot to get a whiff of it.
Can Ambit give you the scent? Ie don’t know. Ie hope that what we
offer you is the true honey. On the gramophone, “Pats Isller’ has been
squawking out one of his extraordinary love songs:-
“If this isn’t love it will have to do -
Until the real thing comes along.”
Ii this isn’t Art, it’ll have to do – until the real thing comes along.”
Martin C. 0. Bax

CONTENTS

3   James Priestman/Michael Foreman Breakfast, 3rd July 2009
6   David Shook Illustrating Tracts
7   Geoff Nicholson/Ken Cox A Spark of Darkness
10 Naomi Frears Art Set
15 Richard Halpern Circus of the Perfume of Time
18 Nick Burbridge Ludo
21 John Harvey/Ken Cox Handy Man
29 Miles Burrows Should Catullus Be Read by Old People?
33 Sandra Glaze/Charles Shearer Gemma’s Inferno
38 Jane Deverson Waking
39 Theresa Reilly-Cooper Art Set
44 Judy Gahagan One Season of Our Inner Year (Rilke)
48 Reviews: Ingram, Murray, Muldoon, Shuttle, Guest, Sail, Duran, Ozmen
53 Donald Gardner/Mireille Fauchon The New Wolf
57 Jeremy Worman/Chris Pig Myfanwy, China, Harry, and a Goldfish
60 Tony Lucas/Michael Foreman Retrospective
64 Vikram Kapur/Astrid Chesney When the White Man Came for Chai
70 Sally Douglas Icon
72 Reviews: Wharton, Petrucci, Brownjohn, Burbridge, Tellegen, Jope, Greinke
76 Robert Cole Curriculum Vitae
78 Alan Blackwood/Michael Foreman Bon Voyage
80 David Ball/ Christian Fumagalli Fumagalli’s Horses
82 Suzanne Conway Grandfather
83 Andrzej Maria Borkowski Self Portraits
88 Tony Dash Nelly’s Billet-Doux
91 Jenny Lewis From Taking Mesapotamia
94 Helena Nelson Drawn
96 Ron Sandford Portrait of Helena Nelson

The deadline for submissions is on Monday 24 April.

Submit to:

Ambit Young Writers

17 Priory Gardens

Highgate

N6 5QY

Prose pieces of up to 5000 words  will be considered, as will poetry of any length.

Download the flyer – Ambit Youth Issue, summer 2011

Don’t forget to read our submission guidelines!