Issue No. 11

This week’s issue moves between the living and the dead. Alexandra Jane Patterson traces the long history of trying to speak to the dead, from Odysseus at his trench of blood to Tolkien’s Necromancer, and finds grief at the root of it. Aaron Sun’s poem takes up Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, who gives everything up and trusts he will have it back. Anthony Kleem mourns the warriors of Orkney who rode to Orphir and did not return.

The two other essays turn to how we use the past and how it shapes us. Jacob Powell argues that the “Thucydides Trap”, the analogy behind so much talk of a coming US–China war, misreads both the ancient historian and the modern world. And Joyce and Bennett meet over education: what school makes of us, and what it costs to resist it.

The Winter Quarterly, our first issue in print, now has seven pieces accepted. Submissions close on 31 October: theastyanax.com/submit.

Hector Hallett, Founder & Editor-in-Chief