mysteryBy A.S.H. Smyth

Feb 9, 2024 | thespectator.com | Adrian Brune |Robbie Mallett |mysteryBy A.S.H. Smyth |A.S.H. Smyth

Many magicians have passed through Las Vegas since its inception somewhere around the early 1940s: David Copperfield, Penn and Teller, Criss Angel. But possibly its most renowned, yet least acclaimed, trickster was a woman named Gloria Dea.  Dea performed traditional magic — the sleight of hand stuff — but she had a specialty in billiard ball manipulation, tossing the balls so that they seem to multiply and then disappear.

Feb 8, 2024 | thespectator.com | Robbie Mallett |A.S.H. Smyth |Freddy Gray |mysteryBy A.S.H. Smyth

“Do you like to dig?” That’s the first question seasoned Antarcticans ask when a scientist tells them he’ll spend winter on the white continent. Digging snow away from doors, windows and shipping containers saps your energy, but they’re not asking about that. Digging is a symbol for all the unglamorous physical tasks that will come to define your life.

Feb 8, 2024 | thespectator.com | A.S.H. Smyth |Robbie Mallett |mysteryBy A.S.H. Smyth |Freddy Gray

In my drafts folder there languishes an email to The Spectator pitching a letter from a then-forthcoming trip to Georgia. That was, alas, the spring of 2020. So when I saw Leo Vardiashvili’s debut novel — Hard by a Great Forest — billed as “a winding pursuit through the magic and mystery of returning to a lost Caucasian homeland,” I leapt at the vicarious travel opportunity.