Journal tagged by Close-up

For our latest Close-up excerpt, we head to New York and the beautiful cakes and deserts mag Cake Zine. For their third issue the editors have expanded the magazine’s remit to include pies, and our selected text takes that even further, looking at the act of pieing in British reality TV show ‘Love Island.’

It’s been a while since we ran an excerpt from a magazine, but who better to restart the strand than Mother Tongue? Launched in 2021 to provide a fresh view of motherhood, the magazine quickly established its place in the indie realm. As well as the excerpt text, the two editors explain what appealed to them about it.

Our latest Close-up excerpt comes from Somesuch Stories, a magazine we’ve hailed previously for its design. This sixth issue is as neatly presented as ever, but we focus this time on the excellent written content, with this section of ‘Rites of Passage’, an experimental piece by Daisy Hildyard.

The Happy Reader returns with another celebration of books and reading. Opening with an interview with artist Mark Leckey, the second part of the issue celebrates the novel ‘Middlemarch’. Our latest Close-up sample comes from that section, a memoir of regularly re-reading George Eliot’s book.

 

Good Sport’s approach to its subject is designed to appeal to even the least sporty reader. Our sample from the new fifth issue shows how fantasy football and the iconic status of sports stars can be used to explain Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra.

We’ve followed MacGuffin since it’s 2015 launch, watching it establish and cement its influential position in the independent magazine world. To mark its 10th anniversary, we present a sample from their latest issue, The Bottle.