The National Institute of Standards and Technology

About the author

Andrew Galan

Andrew Galan is the author of two collections of poetry, That Place of Infested Roads and For All the Veronicas, and his work has...

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Non-fictionPublishing is a weird industry, a retail supply service where every day hundreds – thousands – of brand-new, untested products are launched, each one a little bit different to the last. The long-haul career trajectory of most writers is increasingly difficult to maintain with incomes nosediving, as evidenced by multiple surveys. The road is cluttered with novelists brought down by ‘bad track’, their new books rejected because of the poor sales of previous titles. But as readers we still need help to discover good books, to figure out what to read next. As book pages, magazines and newspapers shrink or disappear altogether, it’s no longer clear what impact book reviewers can have on a career. The endorsement of someone whose work – critical or otherwise – you admire remains important to many writers.

Lifedorm

FictionThe fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh decades filled me with bitterness. I felt like the big oak tree in the centre of our play garden, stuck in the same place forever. Except even the oak tree’s life was more interesting because when it was small Parent 3 had told us to be careful not to step on it, and now it was this huge thing with ugly tree wrinkles and scars in the trunk from the branches we cut off to build a raft one summer, but I’d hardly grown at all.

High life

FictionWe’ve just finished one of the longest and hardest shifts of the year, and we are too tired to leave the building. It’s Christmas Eve, a 35-degree night, and we survived three dinner seatings while being two people down. We also all worked a double, and our staff meal was the butt ends of bread choked down with blood-temperature water while polishing cutlery. Every single person we served was tired, stressed, sick of spending money and not looking forward to seeing their in-laws. They also all wanted dressing on the side, no garlic and everything gluten free, but to also have multiple serves of the pasta of the day.