Garbed in a sequence of paradigmatic structures such as the joke, the notebook, the novel and the script, this issue’s range of contributions defy the innate obsolescence of classification through their embrace of poetic analysis. Drawing theme and method from a new translation of Roland Barthes’ notes for a lecture course The Preparation of the Novel, which starts ‘...as if I was going to write one’, What Am I? is not quite what it looks, but we’ve decided to publish anyway.

Contributors: Tripp, Sarah; Sutcliffe, Stephen; Prouvost, Laure; Price, Seth; Lippard, Hanne; Kraus, Chris; Hirsch, Antonia; Gibson, Beatrice; Ewan, Ruth; Clark, George; Briggs, Kate; Basar, Shumon; Barthes, Roland.

The Happy Hypocrite is a biannual journal led by artists’ writings. Informed by a lineage of modern experimental and avant-garde magazines, such as: Bananas, Documents, The Fox, Merlin and Tracks, this journal aspires to unpack the methodology of such key journals, whilst providing a brand new approach to art writing. It will provide a greatly needed testing ground for new writing and research-based projects, somewhere for artists, writers and theorists to express experimental ideas that might not otherwise be realised or published. In this issue bodies of new writing present techniques of collage & bricolage, found text and image, interspersed with appropriated and parodic writing.