This week, we’re back! We took a semi-planned pause from our Substack newsletter, as some travel and other events waylaid us a bit, and we return with our Summer 2026 Quarterly. Check it below, and next week keep an eye out for a major announcement (“it’s a major award”), wherein our friends in the Cordelivres Club (that’s you) will meet a new, regular contributor to the Substack: Miss Quote. As we’ve not yet had a regular contributor, I for one find this a scintillating time to be alive.
More on that next week! For now, please peruse the fashionably late Summer Q, and we hope all our American readers enjoy (survive?) the big birthday bash.
P.S. Find the full Quarterly here
Each year the L’Esprit Summer Quarterly, in theory, comes out on Bloomsday; which, for those in the know, was about three weeks ago. An apologia: for this Quarterly, we’re doing something a bit different, in part because of some major, and time-consuming, and (mostly) fun events on my end over the last couple of months—defending the PhD, moving, traveling, starting a new job, battling a historic European heatwave—and in part, of course, because of the launch of our press’ first book, Michael Nath’s Talbot & The Fall, in Wales and London last week. Indeed I’m writing this from my rented flat in Paris, where the heat has finally abated and I’m finding a moment to get this Q out the door. (Big thanks to our Managing Editor Sam Stone for her work on this as well!)
While we’ve discussed Talbot a fair bit in our previous Quarterlies, we thought it’d be nice to celebrate it (and, admittedly, give me a bit less to do during my trip!) by running a brief excerpt of the novel here, in lieu of our normal format. We had great readings and talks at Cover to Cover bookshop in Wales, and in London at Hatchards on Piccadilly and the Soho Poly Theater. Thanks to all those who came—and, in England, braved the heat!—and for those spaces for putting on three excellent events. Our planned Paris events were postponed due to the weather, malheureusement, but happily we’ve pushed them to October and will be back then. Check out our Instagram pages for more from those readings. And, if you’re in the New York area, be sure to come to our joint LLR / Talbot reading on July 18th at The Burren in the Bronx.
Below you’ll find a bit of the first chapter of Talbot, which Michael read at the Soho Poly. If you’re interested in learning more about the novel you can read a wonderful conversation between Michael and Eliza Marley of Chicago Review of Books which came out yesterday. Thanks to Eliza and CHIRB for that!
We do have a few Quarterly staples, though, as well: three new book reviews from our excellent team, which you’ll see previewed after the Talbot excerpt. You can find ways to order the novel on our website; as always, thanks so much for your support of fearless writing.
The next Quarterly I write will be from California, as we prepare for the launch of Issue Nine and look ahead to Issue Ten, unbelievably, in April of 2027. In the meantime, keep an eye on our socials for news about further titles, and an exciting new series coming to the Substack from a certain, rather theatrical, past contributor. Much to look forward to over the rest of the year, and the next one. For now I have to get back to my wanderings of the city; allons-y !
Consciously,
L’Esprit
D. W. White, Editor
Talbot & The Fall: A Comedy (With Support)
Chapter 1. Charlie Talbot (Undergrad – CW). – The Completion Retreat. – In a pickle with her writing project. – Doc Todd’s advice. – Bampa Talbot’s stories. – Listening all her life. – The ‘game’ with Dad. – Thou shalt not ‘binge’. – Charlie’s pals: tomorrow, the bandstand.
Friday morning, they had a meeting in the Pavilion with Doc Huddersfield to ‘double down’ on the approaching Completion Retreat. The Pavilion being a conference-cum-teaching room, orange, white and dill. The chairs swivelled; so did the desklets. Imagining the class swivelling in formation as Doc H moved about and addressed them, Charlie Talbot swivelled slightly anti-clockwise: through the window to the side, yellow cranes, blue sky; towers, roof tops, garrets.
Oh to be with the gremlins and spirits, beyond the Pavilion of Despair!
The retreat at Hudsbury (Norfolk): four days in the country by a manor house (their very own chalets de luxe!) – to help them ‘finish’ (ha ha) their final-year writing projects. Our Charlie, it had to be faced, hadn’t actually started hers (in any satisfactory form), and the bastard was due to be submitted by May 8th. Already, they were well into April. The retreat was her last chance. That was the truth of the matter. Needed to come up with twelve thousand words of prose, Novel, Life Writing, Memoir, whatever, if she wasn’t to royally fuck up her degree – and confirm what the whole world knew, but kindly kept quiet about: Charlie Talbot would never be a writer; best start considering her options as assistant manager of a boiled-sweet shop, or shepherdess; crane-driver, PA, or lush – unless she joined the navy like brother Johnny (for a laugh, he’d suggested this at Christmas). On the kidney-shaped desklet, her notebook was shut.
With the assistance of slides, Doc H was explaining something she ought to have been attending to. La charmante Preeti, sitting beside, could fill her in later; like a dog when the garden gate’s been left ajar, Charlie’s mind was wandering out.
‘Just listen for your theme!’, Doc Todd told her, last autumn. Doc T being her designated supervisor. ‘You’ll hear it rising like the wind.’ Thanking Doctor Todd for his wisdom, Charlie went away. She had been listening, all her life; wasn’t helping with her final-year project.
From the earliest she could remember, she’d listened to Bampa Talbot tell her stories where she starred: Charlie and her little pals lost in the woods; eaten all their picnic, and it was getting dark; the woods were haunted with ghosts, and they were frightened; but Charlie saved the day by having them hold hands for a magic dance. Amazing how it all wrapped up. Charlie’s eyes like saucers. If Bampa T ever changed a thing on the repeats, she gave him what for, sat in his lap in her slippers. Laughing, he told her exactly the same as last time. Should have asked how he did it.
Too late now. Her very first grief. March 31st 2008.
Nana ten years a widow.
Smell the cigs on his cardi still.
To listen is to love, or vice versa.
Yeah, and to listen when you love so much you’ve agreed not to listen too much, that was just now quite a problem. Honestly! Unless this were another of her excuses …
Look: the ‘Agreement’ with Dad she was honouring – by and large she was. Not that it was a rule or order; more like a pact, or game even; but strong for being a game; if not stronger, since rules and orders were an invitation to disobedience, like ‘fight the power, girl!’ – not that she often accepted the invitation (unlike Preeti, who was bold as brass). Whereas with a game, the both of you were willing in a different way; you loved playing it – or began to, until it became more important than anything else you were meant to be doing.
All started on holiday last August, a rainy day in Swansea – to be reported in full pretty soon. Just to advise you here that the game was based in a kind of ‘music’ cult of Dad’s, yeah?
Possibly, he’d been so secretive, or private, about this, and for ever such a long time, she hadn’t noticed till that rainy day. Unless she’d been too absorbed in her own silly, fantastic life for the last twenty two years – all here for the first time, aren’t we? Yeah, so absorbed, she’d overlooked that he often had these crummy phones in his ears; either that, or she’d just not been interested. Not that he wasn’t still pretty close about it all now she’d ‘joined in’ (though not quite as close as that rainy day when it began).
Anyway, this game, or whatever you wanted to call it – where you listened to only two tracks a week (by T** F***) – was dear to Charlie, not only because of the wonderful content (wonderful she now found it, though at the start it’d been a very different story!). It was also dear because it enabled her to break, disobey, what have you, a command or invitation of our culture.
Now one thing Charlie Talbot had was a sensitive ear for the language or voice of the time. We’ll hear more of this later; at the moment, let’s just note that it was often a critical, even irritated ear.
And among the things that irritated it was the command, or invitation, to ‘binge’, on TV shows for example. Seemed like you were being told to ‘binge’ all the bloody time, by a silly, grinning (invisible) face that took for granted you, your desires, personality. Like, ‘Come on! You know you want to!’ And the invisible face was grinning because it knew itself to be naughty-safe. Since ‘bingeing’ was bad, when it came to Pils, shots, cake or drugs; but quite all right, supposedly, when it came to televisual entertainment. Well to come back to her and Dad’s game, it would have been possible (and indeed, was very inviting) to binge-listen to tracks in a YouTube orgy. Which was the other reason she honoured the game. Hating the word ‘binge’ as she did, here was a way of proving herself.
Which wasn’t helping her final-year project; so she told herself; while admitting that this might just be an excuse for not having started the bastard.
After the session with Doc H, she gathered her pals in the foyer, Preeti, Victoria Thorndyke, Kitty Vinogradova, Paloma Ruez, with a view to playing them something on her phone that was going to help her raise a wind for her project. That was the big idea. Saturday on the bandstand in the park. Tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
But before all that, Friday evening: her and Dad. Sometimes, they tried to sing tracks he’d played her. What a hoot that was.
Thanks for reading. Come back next week for our major award—and in the meantime, stay critical!