‘Like work, like the scrolling social media feed, like data centres and disk storage and money, activity in the gym is potentially limitless. The virtual track could go on forever, as long as you’re willing to run it.’

In the summer issue of the Dublin Review, Roisin Kiberd writes about urban fitness culture, the shapeless life of the freelancer, and the Night Gym: a place where, among the shift-workers and the drunk and the merely odd – and free from the surveillance of the glossy Day Gym – you can cherish/punish your body. ‘The Night Gym’ is a brilliant piece of cultural criticism and self-examination.

Also in the summer Dublin Review, Andrew Purcell explores the world of America’s teenage lifers: prisoners who received mandatory life sentences for crimes committed as minors. Following a series of Supreme Court judgements, some of these prisoners are now being released. Purcell, reporting from Philadelphia, tells the remarkable story of one of them: John Pace, sentenced to life at 17, and now a free adult for the first time in his forties.

There is no possible description of Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s ‘All My Exes Live in Texas’ that wouldn’t completely undersell it: it is as strange, vivid and engaging a piece of narrative as you might ever hope to read. Plus, Peter Geoghegan encounters the rebirth of the Tito cult in the former Yugoslavia, and short stories by Darragh McCausland and David Sergeant.