Hamish Hamilton’s Five Dials Magazine: It ain’t half bad (and it’s FREE)

There I am going through my usual morning routine of ‘feed reading’ on Bloglines, when I stumbled across the mention in one of my favourite bookish blogs – dovegreyreader scribbles (I just adore the way she writes), of a literary magazine I’ve never heard of before called Five Dials. It’s an electronic magazine produced by refined London publisher Hamish Hamilton (they have the likes of Kiran Desai, Zadie Smith and Steve Tolz on their books don’t you know?) and, as I stated in the title in a rather more unrefined manner – it ain’t half bad.

Not only is the production value of the Five Dials magazine really high (would anyone expect anything less from a publisher?), the content is superb. With essays from the likes of Iain Sinclair on Reading Turgenev to transcript interviews with the likes of Noam Chomsky, this is a magazine that’s seems to be an essential for any true literary fan (and if it’s good enough for dovegreyreader then that’s good enough for me )). Four issues to date (all of which are shown above and linked directly to the PDF file), and all can be easily downloaded directly from the Hamish Hamilton website. While you’re there you may also want to subscribe to the mailing list so you can be informed when new issues become available.

One thing I’m not sure about though. In the premiere issue Editor Craig Taylor states that Five Dials will be published monthly, but the latest issue dates back to November 2008 so I only hope that Five Dials is on a winter break rather than a suspension. I’ll try and find out!

EDIT: Good News! Anna Kelly of Hamish Hamilton finally got back to me and Five Dials magazine is still well and truly alive and kicking, with a new edition coming real soon. In her owns words Anna explained that “the Hamish Hamilton concept of a month is a fluid, flexible thing, and sometimes a month may be more like a month and a half . . . or two months, depending on . . . various things.” Hehehe..gotta love publisher humour eh? ). Thanks Anna!