a truthful flux
December 2025
Do you have all your Christmas presents sorted yet? No, me neither. But fear not, for Gutter is here to help. You can purchase gift subscriptions to the magazine for as little as £10, and it’s the perfect present for any reader in your life.
That £10 will get you a digital gift subscription, which you can purchase in the name of the one you love. Our next two issues will arrive in their inbox as a Pdf and/or an Epub file, ready for whatever eReader they happen to use. Frankly, it’s a bargain.
For those who prefer print, a standard gift subscription is only £20. That’s less than the cost of a Cola-glazed ham hock pizza, and only half the price of an underwhelming Lego kit. True, you can purchase a pack of Tiramisu Truffles for £19, but let’s be honest: those will last about four minutes, whereas a Gutter subscription will bring two magnificent copies of the magazine to your friend or sibling or parent or child or spouse or lover or colleague, each one packed with poetry, fiction, essays and reviews. It’ll last all year! If you can find a better deal than that, we’d like to know about it.
Once you’ve made that very wise purchase, you can take a look at what’s new on our website. First, our editorial team has recommended a selection of the best books we’ve read this year. Some of these books are brand new, others are not; some are by Scottish authors, others not. It’s a great mix, demonstrating the team’s broad range of tastes and interests. We hope you find something there that you like. (And thanks to Katy Hastie, one of our editors, who provided the title of this month’s newsletter.)
Finally, a poem. Or two poems, you might say. In our latest issue, we were delighted to feature a piece by Scotland’s current Makar (poet laureate), Peter Mackay. The poem, ‘Duanag mu dheidhinn Dòbhrain’, is in Gaelic, with an English translation, also by Mackay. So if you’d like to read ‘An Innocuous Poem about Otters’, you’ll find both versions side-by-side here. It’s truly superb, and we hope you enjoy it.
The Gutter team wishes you all the best for the end of the year, and we’ll be back with our next newsletter in 2026.