sundry

ISSUE NO.10

December 18th 2025

Unlike the popular myths about them, lemmings do not fall from the sky. Nor do great writers. Sometimes though, when putting together an issue a submission will come through that feels so perfect and well, Lemming-y, that the piece can feel spontaneously generated, like weather. While we have loved every single article and poem published over the years, each of us Lemmings wanted to shout out a specific piece that we feel captures the essence of the mag. These are some of our favourites.

THE LEMING: A RETROSPECTIVE

sun, sex and suspicious parents

By Lydia Rostant

I am taken by the suburbs the way I am sometimes taken by tonsillectomy videos when sick: a need to witness the incision elsewhere. Rostant’s piece haunts me - having grown up closer to the M3 than I’d ever admit - her fever-dream crawl through American cinema’s cul-de-sacs reveals the suburb as stage-set and pressure cooker: quiet rot, curdled desire, casual violence, neat geometry & psychic swamps. She makes the familiar tilt uncanny again, makes me taste the drive-through, to feel Sunday evening on
my skin.

maintenance & ritual

By Eleanor Moselle

I love this piece from Issue 9 because it is erudite, exacting and elegant; part social history, part personal journey through mouldy rental bathrooms and steamy Japanese bath houses. Moselle’s skill is showing her working without you feeling lost. I am drawn to the image she creates of her own body distorted by the metal bath taps. Half-submerged, she wonders if the antidote to our ever-divided times is a sense of collective intimacy forged through this act of communal bathing. Judging by the number of saunas popping up in London today, I reckon she’s on to something.

still in patina blue

By Frances Howe

Still in Patina Blue came out of nowhere for us, editorially. The piece emerged from somewhere in the US South and flew into our inbox; it was a gorgeous little piece that filled a hole. It was local, ubiquitous. That last line; She drives to no particular destination, returning only to stillness when money runs out. May all writers aim for this rare breed of selfless exhibitionism when portraying the quiet niches of our days.

tarrare

By Samuel Glyn

One can only read this account of Tarrare, France’s culinary blemish, with wide eyes. Through Glyn’s gothic narration, we are introduced to an array of trinkets brought to life by the Frenchman’s unique hunger. You could expect such a subject to repel its author from the inner-churnings of a man mythically drawn to cannibalise toddlers, yet Glyn had the mettle to traverse into Tarrare’s psyche, yanking us deeper into his tent and ever closer to his gaze, maintaining eye contact through the liquid mist.