Editor Toby Litt explains in the introduction: newness is quite a venerable category. Theres not much thats new about it. In the 1930s, when a magazine called New Writing was first published, it had to compete with New Signatures, New Country, New Verse, The New Statesman, Nation and New Theatre, and new everything else.... Even then, new wasnt new. If weve achieved diversity, its because our submissions were themselves diverse; and the final selection is representative of the proportion of short stories to novel extracts, poems and essays that were submitted. Originality is only proven over time, paradoxically.