Serpentine Reader returns with issue 02: I Hope This Finds You Well

The Serpentine Reader launches its second annual edition on Monday, March 9th, 2026 at 6 pm at The Magazine, Serpentine North. Titled Issue 02: I Hope This Finds You Well, the publication continues its commitment to slow publishing, offering a thoughtful alternative to fast-paced cultural commentary through long-form writing and critical reflection.

Presented in both online and physical formats, the new issue reimagines the genre of self-help at a time marked by social instability and ecological fragility. Building on the inaugural issue, Circulation, this edition turns to the familiar email phrase “I hope this finds you well” to question what wellness truly means in an increasingly unwell world.

Slow publishing as cultural resistance

Rooted in the ethos of slow publishing, the Serpentine Reader creates space for deep research and creative experimentation across essays, fiction, poetry, critiques, and experimental guides. Issue 02 examines how care and “being well” have become commodified — reduced to corporate mindfulness, automated responses, and digital companionship — while collective conditions continue to deteriorate.

In this context, self-help evolves into something more complex: a shared narrative of survival, longing, and resilience. Contributors explore how wellness is performed, managed, and monetised, asking whether new forms of collective care might emerge from crisis.

This year’s contributors include Stephanie Wambugu, Eliot Haworth, Alex Quicho, Anahid Nersessian, Joycelyn Longdon, Asa Seresin, David Lisbon, and Ebun Sodipo — bringing together established and emerging voices across disciplines. Their texts span subjects from AI intimacy and institutional psychotherapy to ecological grief, media theory, divorce culture, and transgender healthcare networks.

Artist Alake Shilling collaborates on the issue with a series of specially commissioned motivational stickers, each copy featuring one unique design from her set Everything is good, and rather splendid (2025). Her contribution underscores the publication’s central tension: how to hold irony and hope in equal measure.

The launch event on March 9th will feature readings by contributors, marking the beginning of a new chapter for the Serpentine Reader— one that treats publishing not as content production, but as a space for sustained inquiry and imaginative possibility.