Gutter 10

Scotland’s leading literary magazine has marked its fifth birthday with a new layout, another fine selection of new Scottish writing, and an interview with Alan Bissett, the first of a regular feature. Zoë Wicomb leads the pack with Art Work, a masterful short story set during the Edinburgh Festival about a mother dealing with, or not dealing with, a son who has chosen to be an artist – not a doctor as she’d hoped.

Gutter debuts from Kate Tregaskis and Nick Athanasiou are both promising – the former for its semi-surreal treatment of turning Edinburgh Zoo into a protest art piece, and the latter for its postmodern uneasiness in separating author and narrator, for the self-conscious manner in which the story unfolds and edits itself. Elsewhere, J Johannesson Gaitán’s Beluga Song has a whale appear in the bath one day, singing ‘like a drunk in a BBC Christmas drama.’ For the narrator and his partner, the whale in the bath is the unmanageable opposite of the elephant in the room: their failing relationship.

The numbers in the editorial are good to know: in five years they’ve published 169 men and 166 women, which is a pleasing balance. It’s a sparkling pool of excellent writers. [Galen O'Hanlon]