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FREE Issue 146

Featuring Barry Sheils CJ Timmins Russ Litten Michael McGlade Simon Barget Darcey Steinke Felicity Hughes

WHODUNNIT?

October 2015

Litro Magazine 56

www.litro.co.uk

ISBN 978-0-9554245-5-7

Arts & Humanities Festival free festival of talks & performance

Events include: • How to be Beyoncé • Whose sari now?

• What did Jesus look like?

• Strung with poet’s sinews • Mask, toys and other voices • Beethoven and the Quartet form: the journey of a creative genius • Power or persuasion? Art and culture as a tool in international politics • Fabric letters: the language of Portuguese fiancé’s kerchiefs • The fabrication of morality: where do morals come from?

• The medieval medicine cabinet

12-23 October 2015 www.kcl.ac.uk/ahfest #ahfest October 2015

Litro Magazine 1

Issue 146 • Whodunnit? • October 2015

CONTRIBUTORS07 EDITOR’S LETTER06 A REMEMBRANCE DAY SERVICE09 BREAK DOWN16 THE LINE UP23 BURN DOWN THE HOUSE32 SELBSTMORD40 THE TELEPHONE MUSEUM47 CONVERSATION51 with Darcey Steinke

'A powerful, moving and fresh portrait of D.H.Lawrence's tortured early years'.

PHOENIX RISING

22 September—17 October 7:30 pm, 3:30 pm Sundays BOOK NOW

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5

Issue 146 • Whodunnit? • October 2015

EDITORIAL Dear Reader, the seeds of doubt in our collective brains.

We do not necessarily need all the answers, just questions worth asking. A good story reads us, sets us aflame. Our imaginations do the rest.”

Crime, Death, Murder all have a fascinating appeal not only in fiction but in fact and on television and at the cinema as well as in books. Indeed TV audience figures and public lending rights data all tell the same tale.

That crime fiction is one of the most-popular forms of entertainment. And that its appeal is unusually broad-based and long-lived.

Despite the unifying theme of mystery, for this month’s edition of Litro Russ has gathered a collection of stories that features several different styles of writing. We have everything from post-modern psychodrama, to swirling lyrical elegy and plain hard-bitten realism in a minimalist style. But whatever the literary technique used to execute the tale, all of them work beautifully. While although, hardly any of these stories are Whodunnits in the classic sense, they all carry that indefinable core of mystery that pulls the reader towards the final sentence. They are all full of tension and exhilaration.They intrigue and bamboozle. Some of them assault the senses whilst others dance and tease. Some are straightforward and some are less so, but however strange some of these tales can get, they are all beautifully constructed self-contained worlds and each one of them carries that unmistakeable whiff of truth so vital to good fiction. All life—and death—is here.

So for October we turn our pages to the Murder Mystery, with a Whodunnit issue and invite award winning Crime writer Russ Litten as our guest editor.

As Russ put’s it: “At the heart of every good story lies a mystery. This is what pulls our eye across the page—the desire to know, to discover, to peel away the layers until the essence of the thing is revealed. I like to hear my heart bang when I read a short piece of fiction. I want to be immersed in a fresh new world I can believe in, however fantastical or unfamiliar, to be dragged through the pages with every sense singing. And what better way to quicken the blood than a whodunnit?

If the five W’s—who, what, why, when and where—are the best friends of the journalist, they are blood brothers to the weaver of fiction. But unlike our friends in the newspapers, authors of short stories concern themselves not so much with the cold hard black-andwhite facts of what has happened as the fuzzy grey areas in-between. What we think or hope or fear could be happening. Writers—and attentive readers—are concerned with the gradual accumulation of detail; a telling turn of phrase, a tilt of the head or a gesture, a shadow glimpsed from the corner of the eye. These are the elements that instil

On being a guest editor for our issue this month Russ write’s: “ I had enormous fun reading and choosing the stories for this collection. Some of them left me with more questions than answers, but that’s all part of the joy. These tales embed themselves in your brain and you will carry them with you long after the final page is turned. I hope you enjoy them just as much as I did.“

Eric Akoto Editor In Chief

October 2015

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Contributors Litro Magazine • Issue 146 • Whodunnit? • October 2015

CJ Timmins

Barry Sheils Barry Sheils is a writer and academic, currently working in Dublin. He has recently published in GorseJournal and his first book, a critical study called W.B. Yeats and World Literature, came out with Ashgate Publishing in 2015.

C. J. Timmins received his MFA degree in Fiction from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and has been a reader for The Literary Review and managing editor of Armchair/ Shotgun. A native of Chester County, Pennsylvania, he lives with his wife in Brooklyn, New York.

Russ Litten

Russ Litten is the author of Scream If You Want To Go Faster and Swear Down. He is the Writer In Residence at a prison in the north of England.

October 2015

Litro Magazine 7

Simon Barget Simon Barget, Resident of Belsize Park and owner of young cats Aethelbert and Bertha has been writing ‘seriously’ since 2007. He self-publishes on abctales.com a sharing website for fledgling writers.

What encourages him to write is the encouragement and validation conferred, for which he is very grateful.

Michael McGlade Felicity Hughes Michael McGlade is an Irish writer with over 60 short stories in journals such as Shimmer, The Big Click, Ambit, Grain, J Journal, and Spinetingler. He holds a master's degree in English and Creative Writing from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's University, Ireland.

Represented by Isobel Dixon of the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency.

Find out the latest news and views from him

Felicity Hughes worked as a journalist in Tokyo for four years writing articles on Japanese popular culture for publications such as The Bookseller, The Guardian, and Japan Times. Since she relocated to Madrid three years ago, she's been concentrating on writing fiction and is close to completing her first novel.

McGladeWriting.com.

Cassandra Yap

Darcy Steinke Is the author of four novels, Up Through the Water, Suicide Blonde, Jesus Saves, and Milk, and the spiritual memoir Easter Everywhere.

Her fifth novel, Sister Golden Hair, was published by Tin House Books in October 2014. Her novels Up Through the Water and Jesus Saves were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year.

Cassandra Yap is an artist based in London. Her work often explores the juxtaposition between dark and beautiful subjects to create the surreal. Fuelled by her love of pin ups, the female form and an unhealthy obsession with vintage erotica, her images are dark, bold and humorous with a kinky edge.

October 2015

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A REMEMBRANCE DAY SERVICE Great sense of pathos built up here by the use of a first person narrator who’s kept at the edge of the story, but infects the entire tale with an understated yearning. Poignant and powerful.

It

by Barry Sheils

must have been the way Lucy Sheridan looked me up and down when she entered the flat that made me think she wanted to have sex with me, or maybe it was her voice hesitating over the intercom, as if she’d found herself standing there in the middle of a dream-bidden errand, suddenly unsure how to proceed. I had greeted her in the hallway with my usual flamboyant kiss to each cheek, but careful to grasp tightly the cordage of my dressing gown, and holding my breath in order to kept my midriff in check.

After our embrace we exchanged a further look—meaningfully I thought—until eventually Lucy turned away without speaking and walked toward the kitchen.

Lucy was from Northern Ireland and extremely beautiful, with dark brown hair and discreet, finely shaped features. Only her eyebrows seemed out of proportion, and added a slight menace to her prettiness. She was petite, but she dressed assertively in sharp suits or else simply in jeans and a tee shirt, and made little attempt to be coy. This suited her accent, which was full of hard sounds, and her astuteness in conversation, which was always to the point. Tragically, she was married to Adam, a successful and handsome man in his early forties—though in keeping with her enlightened self-image she had retained her own family name. Lucy and Adam had a reputation in our circle for being particularly savvy when it came to the marriage game. It was said they did not put undue pressure on one another, or make excessive demands on each other’s time: they ‘understood the need for space’. Their marriage was considered, in this light, and after only five years, to be a success. I liked Adam: he was genial and quick-witted, but we often found ourselves at a loss for conversational subject matter. Beneath the pleasantries we exchanged every time we met we disagreed about so much. He ran his own financial consultancy and made a lot of money; I wrote history books that sometimes didn’t sell more than five hundred copies worldwide. One of my hermetic pleasures was hearing Lucy decry his materialism. Although I knew it was a rather hollow criticism she sometimes referred to him scathingly as Adam Smith.

When she came into the lounge carrying the cafetière and two mugs I could see she was upset. Her hair was slightly flattened from the rain. She noticed me examining her and smiled, weakly.

‘How’s your book coming along?’ she asked, to deflect my attention, as she kicked off her shoes and curled onto the sofa. At that time I was writing a book on international terrorism, relating it to the history of the occident, the fall of Rome, that kind of thing.

It was an unwieldy subject, and one that I didn’t really know very much about, but my publisher told me it was guaranteed to sell in the current political climate. As Lucy had deadpanned on another occasion, international terrorism’s the new Buddhism.

‘I don’t think you have come here at two in the morning to ask about my book’ I said, not wanting to think about or try to excuse my lack of progress. She looked crestfallen, so I thought that I should humour her. ‘It’s going ok, but I can’t really find a satisfactory angle, to be honest. The problem is that any analogy to Gibbon is already so tired…’ She wasn’t listening. She had created a prop for her chin by resting her elbow on her lap. She was hunched over and pensive. I had only put the side light on and a dark shadow from the spider-plant fell across her forehead and her nose.

October 2015

Litro Magazine 9

BREAK DOWN Has the feel of a classic Raymond Carver story—pare and subtle. Beautifully paced; fills the reader with an increasingly unsettled awareness of things gone awry.

Luke

by CJ Timmins

sat at the desk in his bedroom and wrestled with his unfinished term paper.

Outside, the autumn moon was near full and a change in the weather had been threatening for hours. Gusts of wind cut the air, tore leaves from their branches, and knocked against the storm windows. His mind drifted and he fixed his gaze on the windows shuddering in the wind. It had been five days since his mother’s funeral and he still had not gotten the cold smell of death out of his nostrils since he had kissed her goodbye. The forced expression of calm that bloated across her face infuriated him. His father, his sister, and all their relatives had pretended to be calm too. Why did everyone always pretend?

The cheap satin lining of her casket and the droning hymns at the funeral mass turned her burial into an impersonal ritual that did not allow him to mourn. At the cemetery, he set a white carnation on the dark mahogany casket and watched as the container filled with his mother descended into the packed earth.

Luke cursed himself under his breath. The television beckoned him, and he pushed away from the desk and plodded downstairs. In the kitchen sink, soapsuds dissolved the microwaved remains of Chinese leftovers clinging to dishes, which would soak until his father returned home from playing darts at a bar and holler at Luke to clean up. He found his groove in the recliner and passed his time alone bouncing between channels to find nothing in particular. He looked up from the television and glanced at his cell phone.

He struggled with calling his sister Marianne. He punched her name into his phone and dialed. She had returned to college in Washington D.C., and Luke imagined her having drinks with a desperate graduate student, so she could not feel her cell phone vibrate in her purse amid the drone of happy hour. Luke hung up without leaving a message and went back to channel surfing.

A set of headlights flickered in the distance through the front windows. He knew his father would not be home yet, and since it was rare for cars to pass through their suburbs at this time of night he took notice. Theirs was once a tight-knit neighborhood with Tupperware parties and benign bicycle gangs. Over the years neighbors had grown suspicious of even the slightest peculiarities.They installed dead bolts, refused solicitors, and monitored garbage collectors. His mother had grown wary of the unfamiliar and once called the police after a neighbor’s flustered visitor accidentally knocked on their door. She thought he was a homeless man looking for a handout and slammed the door in his face.

The headlights came to a stop. Luke got up from the recliner and walked to the window to get a better look.The old sedan parked at the edge of the lawn. An older man emerged from the driver's seat and went around to the front passenger tire, then to the trunk. Luke watched the man pull out a jack and he figured he had a flat tire. His curiosity faded and he returned to the recliner to watch television. His mind drifted to thoughts of his mother and how close his parents had grown since the diagnosis, their marriage began to repair itself, and the hope of the cancer’s remission promised a return to romance and much more. But as the treatments failed, cracks in their marriage turned to fissures, and under the pressure of her imminent death, Luke’s father fell into the whiskey bottle.

October 2015

Litro Magazine 16

THE LINE UP This really happened to me. Not quite like this, but enough so for me to get a story out of it.

by Russ Litten

She’s

crying again.

Johnny lies on the couch and listens to the noises coming from behind the bedroom door.

He doesn’t know how long she’s been awake, or even if she went to sleep. He knows for a fact that he hasn’t. Johnny’s been lying here, cramped up on this couch with his eyes closed and his head jammed wide open, scrambled messages from inner and outer space ricocheting around his brain.

Her noise, his silence: the soundtrack to their last three days.

It sounds like the tail end of something, though, this crying; muffled sobs into bunched up sheets that dissolve into trembling hiccups and snot-choked sighs. Johnny listens to her breathing; snatched and ragged at first, but then steadying and submerging, succumbing to the heavy depths of sleep.

Sleep.

Then a wail of fresh anguish leaps out from behind the door and fires into his gut like a harpoon. The renewed bout of sobbing goes on for another five minutes or so but seems like several lifetimes lived over.

I can’t stand very much more of this, he thinks. *** All quiet now, except for the noise of traffic from the street below and a telly laughing away to itself in one of the downstairs flats.

Silence from the bedroom door.

The sun really pours into this place first thing in a morning, belting through the pale blue bed sheet that’s tied across the window. Johnny twists around on the couch, the hot sunshine spreading across his back, tongue clacking around in a cotton-wool mouth.

He’s managed to kick the sleeping bag off in the night, and a blind fumble on the floor to retrieve it results in fingernails dipped in soggy ash and a glass of something spilt.

—Bastard, says Johnny.

He clamps his eyes shut and tries to burrow his way back down among the cushions, twisting onto his front, his side and then onto his front again. It’s useless. No matter how he twists his tired bones, Johnny can’t escape the glare of the sun That relentless bastard sun.

Johnny thinks that he might as well get up, but as soon as his eyes blink open there’s a brilliant black flashbulb stamped straight onto his retinas. Screwing them tight shut again only sends tiny white circles exploding backwards into his skull. Johnny grinds his fists into his eye sockets and then sits with head between hands until everything gradually comes wobbling back into focus: the carpet swimming below him; the edges of the table; the telly to the left of the window; the radiators; the chairs; the blurred edges of the room beyond that. Johnny can’t see it properly, but he knows it’s all still there.

October 2015

Litro Magazine 23

BURN DOWN THE HOUSE Snappy dialogue, a clever, snaking plot-line and a wonderful comic twist at the end. A smart and sassy story that feels like an extract from a classic 1950’s detective novel.

Marlon

by Michael McGlade

Monroe was shoehorned onto a bench between a wedge-shaped man with bruises that ringed his eyes like coffee stains and a pregnant woman who reeked of booze. No free seats left in the cramped waiting room. Coughs and splutters, walking aides and neck braces. Latino, Chicano, Salvadorian, Guatemalan. Marlon, the only latte, had short dark hair, a weekend's worth of stubble, and an off-the-rack suit that never saw an iron. The only men he knew who ever ironed were Navy SEALs. Outside, an ambulance wept by.

"Mr. Monroe," the secretary said with a smile.

Marlon entered a cramped office that had no carpet or drapes. Stacks of files teetered against unpainted walls. Seth Levi sat at his desk, hair like rusted steel wool and a tailored navy pinstripe suit.

"I like your new office," Marlon said. "Just a block away from the hospital."

"I go where the money is," Seth conceded.

"I know. I've seen your commercials on late night cable. Medical malpractice, nursing home abuse, workman's comp, auto accidents—get what's yours."

"Ouch. Retract your claws, ok. It pays the bills. But I'd have thought you must have plenty of peaceful nights now you don't dine with your police scanner on the table."

Marlon's blue eyes sparked.

Seth opened a drawer, slapped a thick dossier on the desk and leafed to a page.

"Yesterday, a house burnt down in the city of Dublin, California, yaddy-yaddy-yah…oh this bit's interesting, the owner, one Mr Tomas Lynch, 71-years-old, deceased, God rest his soul, natural causes, leaves a sizable estate but no will." Seth paused to let the information sink in.

"Find me next of kin, bring them in, we split the finder's fee."

Marlon frowned.

"What? Not high level enough?"

"I didn't say that."

"Consider it lucky I'm still friends with you and as a friend I am willing to offer you a lifeline, unlike certain acquaintances in SFPD, who think you're toxic waste. This is paid work, my friend."

"Doesn't mean I have to like it." Marlon grabbed the page with the details of the job and walked out of the office. He stepped out onto the sidewalk on the corner of 24th and Potrero.

Workmen on a scissor lift bolted a sign above the premises: Seth Levi Law Offices—Get What's Yours! SF General on one end of the street and Bayshore Freeway on the other. Warm and sunny in the Mission, same as always. Marlon got into a Toyota with two hundred thousand miles on the clock and beyond the Mission District a foggy stew ghosted San Francisco city. *** Marlon scanned through the printout from a next of kin search in the Public Records Office.

He thumbed a number into his cell phone, took a deep breath and dialed. "Parker, it's me."

"Monroe? Never thought I'd hear from you again."

October 2015

Litro Magazine 32

SELBSTMORD Shades of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P Lovecraft in this wholly original and gripping story.

Builds the tension wonderfully before pulling the rug away from beneath the reader.

Last

by Simon Barget

week in my local bookshop, I found the following text printed on a lime-green card which had been inserted into the pages of one of the short story collections of the celebrated Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges: £100,000 reward, email selbstmord@sab.com for further instructions

I panicked without knowing why. I had an urge to tear it up, to destroy it. I wanted to take it to the sales assistant and complain. It was something hot and dangerous. I wanted to be exonerated from any suspicion that I had done wrong, but what wrong could I possibly have done? I couldn’t rewind the clock now. Something about this discovery seemed important, but I couldn’t put my finger on what.

I tried to think logically. Had it been left by accident? But an accident didn’t seem plausible since this would require the concatenation of a series of unlikely consequences: 1) thumbing through the book whilst holding the card, 2) resting the card between two of the pages, 3) relinquishing the hold on the card, 4) forgetting about the card, 5) closing the book on the card, 6) returning the book to the shelf; and, above all, 7) failing to realise between the time of leaving the bookshop and the moment when I discovered the card that it had been left in the book for all that time. When people look through books on bookshelves they generally don’t have anything in their hands, it being hard enough to look through books unencumbered. Something simpler struck me: could the card have been left by someone working at the printers? Was it a marketing stunt? A way for a secondrate writer to get a reluctant audience? I’d heard of instances such as these—I’m actually a literary agent. But if this were true, why not just put down a website? Then I thought: ok it’s just a joke, it’s a staff gag, and they’re secretly watching just to see how I react. Then I halffeared a candid camera assault, someone appearing out of the blue to catch me out, for what purpose I couldn’t really divine.

But no one was paying attention, neither the other three people in the shop, nor the guy behind the till who was looking at once sheepish and supercilious as these young sales assistants tend to do.

No, it hadn’t been left there by accident; I was certain of that.

I reread the text fearing that doing so would draw me in to something unsavoury. ‘£100,000 reward, ‘email selbstmord@sab.com for further instructions.’ I had not yet processed the ominous ‘Selbstmord’, the German word for suicide. I thought of those group suicides in Japan in what they called Suicide Forest. I wondered whether it was an offbeat party invitation or part of a recondite game. But it was only at this point that I actually stopped to process exactly what the card was saying, and its claim was clear: for the person who was willing to carry out a designated task, there would be a reward of £100,000. I’d be told what to do. ‘For further instructions’. It felt like I’d been chosen already.

I checked the adjacent books on the shelf, the stock categorised according to author location. The other Borges story collection was cardless and I checked it umpteen times.

I looked through thirty other books on those shelves. Nothing. Then the other sections in the shop, another thirty or so books. I pretended I was perusing each one. I looked through children’s books and even those hazardous design books people put on their coffee tables.

I couldn’t go round the whole shop and check every book. Why had he chosen Borges anyway? How was it that the first book I happened to pick up was the only one with this card in it? What were the chances of that?

October 2015

Litro Magazine 40

THE TELEPHONE MUSEUM Elements of the Victorian Horror fiction. A curious tale that keeps on unfolding.

by Felicity Hughes

Sam

felt like a spy. Trailing Anton along Tottenham Court Road, down Store Street, hanging back in a doorway when his quarry crossed the street, and keeping pace on the other side. It was the kind of game they’d played together as kids. Wearing false moustaches and oversized hats, they’d followed suspicious characters round the neighbourhood. Made notes about their ‘activities’ in a little leather book Anton had kept in a secret compartment in his backpack.

Before Sam even worked out it was Anton, his eye had zoomed in on this gangly figure leaning forward as he marched through the ambling crowds with a battered briefcase in hand. Anton looked different, not fashionable, but better defined than the pale kid Sam remembered. Dressed in a tailored brown wool suit that was too warm for the season, there was something a little out-dated about his get up. He stood out from the other office workers who, like Sam, were dressed in off the hanger suits.

Anton had been a weird one. Always alert to the possibility of plots and conspiracies he’d keep an eye out for cracks in their safe suburban reality that might lead them to an entirely different and thrillingly dangerous underworld. One time they’d followed a tramp back to his ‘lair’ because Anton had said he was a dangerous catnapper, responsible for the spate of feline disappearances in the neighbourhood. They’d staked out this abandoned building, waiting for him to leave so they could collect evidence. But all they’d found was smashed glass and a bunch of metal beer bottle tops which Anton had pocketed for his collection.

Still, it had been a proper adventure.

Perhaps it was in this spirit that Sam found himself stalking his old friend instead of calling out to him. He had to find out what he was up to, for though he’d Googled Anton over the years, he had always come up empty. Strange not to have a web presence in this day and age.

Anton turned off Store Street and Sam slowed his pace to put a bit of distance between them. Anton’s footsteps rang out. Tock, tock, tock; a measured beat audible now the cacophony of central London had faded. Anton rounded a corner and Sam sprinted to close the distance between them, past rows of frowning dark stone houses.

He was just in time to see Anton disappear inside an elegant town house. Though it was still light outside, blinds had been drawn down over the street level windows. Beside the door was a brass plaque: Telephone Museum

by Appointment Only.

Sam looked at his phone. A large blue circle hovered over the map of Bloomsbury.

‘Google cannot pinpoint your location.’

Droplets of rain began to spot the pavement and Sam’s resolution to ring the ivory bell above the plaque faded. Instead, he dashed into a pub across the road.

Inside it was dead quiet; only a few old jossers sat in silence contemplating their pints. He ordered a lager.

‘Nice little pub you’ve got here,’ said Sam. The barman, a willowy aristocratic man in his sixties, didn’t smile to acknowledge the complement, but simply demanded payment. That pissed Sam off; people thinking they October 2015

Litro Magazine 43

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CONVERSATION with Darcey Steinke

by Mia Funk Darcey Steinke—author of novels Suicide Blonde, Jesus Saves, and the spiritual memoir Easter Everywhere—talks about faith, Kurt Cobain, freedom, the 70s and her fifth novel, Sister Golden Hair (Tin House). Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, and The Guardian. She teaches at Columbia and other universities. Her books have been translated into ten languages.

Q2

The sense from abroad is that America is kind of like a teenager, someone who has grown up very quickly, too fast, maybe developed in all sorts of awkward ways––and in Sister Golden Hair you really captured that time in the 70s: the awkwardness and the grace.

Q1

In your fiction you use an every day situation like commuting home from JFK airport to touch on spirituality in America.

Well, thanks so much. I worked really hard to make the 70s real. Listened to endless records that came out then. Sister Golden Hair is a song by America. I looked up the bestseller lists and I read those books cause I just didn’t want to do the way it looked. I also wanted to do: What were people thinking?

What was life really like? I wanted to do my version of the 70s not the general version of the 70s that you see replicated. Cause I was a little girl in the 70s.

I feel like anybody can make a church or a garden spiritual, but for me the more interesting thing is to see if you can make holy or spiritual things that are just very ordinary. I also think that’s kind of the truth.

I think if God exists it’s everywhere, not just in a church. But in an ugly spot. In a spot A little bit. Not completely. where atrocities happen. There’s all sorts of places that are holy, not just the ones that are defined that way by the culture. That’s always been a part of my work. From the very beginning.

No, no. I’m a little bit like all the girls, OK. I feel like when you were a little girl in the 70s there’s a lot of wonder about it. There’s the tacky clothes and all that, but there’s something kind of sad about it. There was something really amazing about it, too. So I wanted to capture that, those contradictions in the book.

Q3

So you'’re Jesse? (the main character)

Q4

October 2015

Litro Magazine 51

Are you Sheila?

Have you ever had anything published?

If you’ve written a book or had an article published, the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society (ALCS) could be holding money owed to you.

ALCS collects secondary royalties earned from a number of sources including the photocopying and scanning of books.

Unlock more information about how you could benefit by visiting www.alcs.co.uk October 2015

Litro Magazine 54

SC H AV O FU AI LA LL LA R S BL HI E PS

Master’s in Philosophy AND ITS USES TODAY PROFESSOR ROGER SCRUTON FBA

October 2015 – September 2016 A one-year, London-based programme of ten evening seminars and individual research led by Professor Roger Scruton, offering examples of contemporary thinking about the perennial questions, and including lectures by internationally acclaimed philosophers.

Seminar-speakers for 2015/16 include: • Roger Scruton • Sebastian Gardner • Simon Blackburn • Raymond Tallis Each seminar takes place in central London and is followed by a dinner during which participants can engage in discussion with the speaker.

The topics to be considered include consciousness, emotion, justice, art, God,

love and the environment. Examination will be by a research dissertation on an approved philosophical topic chosen by the student, of around 20,000 words. Guidance and personal supervision will be provided.

Others who wish to attend the seminars and dinners without undertaking an MA dissertation can join the Programme at a reduced fee as Associate Students.

Course enquiries and applications: Ms Claire Prendergast T: 01280 820204 E: claire.prendergast@buckingham.ac.uk

THE UNIVERSITY OF

BUCKINGHAM

LONDON PROGRAMMES

May 2015 October 2015

Litro Magazine Litro The University of Buckingham is ranked in Magazine the élite top sixteen of the 120 British Universities: 5 55 The Guardian Universities League Table 2012-13