With its subtitle ON THE MARKET the debate concerning writing as commodity is key to this edition of Pretext. Jon Cook in his introduction situates Pretext points within the little magazine scene, which is arguable given its status within perhaps the pre-eminent academic institution for creative writing, the University of East Anglia. Given this status, ironically, it can afford to be eclectic and not merely focus on the local or only new writers. Jon Cook's claim that the various forms of stories here reveal an imaginative invention and depth that make them more than smooth literary commodities is entirely accurate. As well as the market place, with an interview edited by Jane Taylor that took place in November 2004 between a well-known writer, Blake Morrison, and a famous psychotherapist, Susie Orbach, other important questions concerning the purpose of writing are engaged with. For the reader, the interview manages to subvert whatever clichés and stereotypes they may have of the psychotherapist as one who imposes a metanarrative on her victim. Orbach makes it clear she is interested in the power of stories, the narratives we tell ourselves, and how emotional life and unconscious processes are expressed. We can see here the natural relationship with creative writing. Morrison attempts to explain what is now the infamous passage from his book AS IF concerning his daughter, by asking whether writing about the body has become so sexualised that it is the only discourse left. These are interesting and complex debates concerning both the content and form of writing that crosses all genres.
Given the problems of space, if there is any fault with this excellent edition it is the emphasis on prose rather than poetry, given it claims to be a balance between fiction, criticism and poetry, although poetry does come last in this list. There are exceptions, such as Keith Chandler's THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR PART 2, a six-page poem and Bogdan Tiganov's LETTER TO PUBLISHERS, EDITORS AND ANYBODY ELSE is a fantastically defiant poem to situate at the start of a collection of writing that examines 'the market'. Here is an excerpt:
publish me or not
like me or not
it makes no difference
to the black cat
in the black night
and its beautiful green eyes
With regards to the fiction, Jane Taylor's THE REDOUBT is a moving story about Caroline, a schoolteacher in south London who is trying, and failing, to do an MA on Joseph Conrad, and a journalist Joe Clunes, who is thinking about doing an article on Caroline's struggle to get in the housing market. It is the other difficulties Caroline faces, with her neighbour and her partner, that are revealed through this layered writing that makes this so exceptional. Anything about house prices, of course, a common so boring conversation not just in the south of England now but all of the UK is for me personally usually a complete turn off but here Taylor depicts this world so fully the story has a lucidity and veracity that brings us closer not merely to the characters but to humanity. The pressure of the proximity of others in one sense and their distance in another is the catalyst for the radical decision Caroline finally makes, as if she no longer wants to read Conrad but actually be him or discover that part of herself. I will not give away the story here only say that the attention to detail makes this story incredibly readable. William Luva's short story HOW I DIED opens with such a bang you know this too is going to be great. As W. B. Yeats put it we
only begin to live when we conceive life as tragedy,
and here, entering the world of a person caught between death in a car accident, the story in the first person reads like a personal revelation.
There are translations of extracts from Andrey Platonov's CHEVENGER and a variety of other stories. An interesting article by Rebecca Swift on the state of the publishing industry encapsulates the overall theme of this edition. Commercialisation may produce a general reduction in the level of good writing as the writing quality is placed second to the marketability of author/product. On this note, I am please that this issue of Pretext subverts this movement. There are fourteen pieces in this edition, if we include the brief introduction. With single issues at £7.99, individual subscription rates at £14, this works out at about 50 pence per piece; a bargain! With the lack of avenues to publish shorter fiction in the UK, it is a shame that Pretext is not published more than twice a year and more generally available. A quarterly would give space to more writers and perhaps take away some of Pretext's more institutional aspects, although all these pieces came through open submission, Cook informs us, rather than through commission or invitation. Swift concludes her piece with the three benefits of commercialisation (higher advances, competition produces hunger for creative production, increased visibility/publicity) against eight negative, destructive or limiting effects of increased commercialisation in the publishing industry. With this kind of ratio, the case against the market place is clear.

C Jason Lee