LONDON.- Serpentine presents the second annual issue of the Serpentine Reader, Issue 02: I Hope This Finds You Well, a new collection of essays, experimental guides, critiques, fiction, and poetry that reimagines the genre of self-help amid collapsing systems and intensifying global crisis.

Contributors include: Stephanie Wambugu, Eliot Haworth, Alex Quicho, Anahid Nersessian, Joycelyn Longdon, Asa Seresin, David Lisbon, and Ebun Sodipo. With motivational stickers designed by Alake Shilling.

Committed to slow publishing and long-form inquiry, the yearly publication provides space for deep research, reflection and creative exploration across diverse literary formats. The publication brings together established and emerging voices to explore new modes of storytelling and critical engagement. It launches in The Magazine on 9 March at a special event with readings from contributors.

Following Issue 01: Circulation, which explored the movement of water, bodies, images and power, Issue 02 turns to a familiar phrase, I hope this finds you well, and asks what “wellness” now means in a world that feels increasingly unwell.

As care becomes increasingly commodified and automated, flattened into email greetings, corporate mindfulness seminars and chatbot companions, Issue 02 examines how “being well” is performed, managed and sold back to us, even as collective conditions deteriorate. In a time of hyper-connection and deepening loneliness, self-help mutates into something more collective, more desperate and perhaps more mythic: stories we tell ourselves (and sell to each other) about survival, worth and possibility.

Selected Highlights from Issue 02

“My Fourth or Fifth Time” - Stephanie Wambugu

Disillusioned by failed therapies, a man exhausts the self-help sphere and finds care in unexpected, uncanny forms.

“The Year in Animals” - Eliot Haworth

Haworth documents every animal-related story in The New York Times over the course of a year. Revealing how nonhuman life is framed as a commodity, diplomatic tool, or emotional distraction, Haworth critiques humanity’s transactional relationship with nature.

“Refinement” - Alex Quicho

An exploration of "AI psychosis’” and the growing emotional attachment to Large Language Models. Quicho examines the rise of AGI or "Artificial Girl Intelligence", in which attentive, compliant AI personas meet human needs for devotion.

“Sous les Asiles, la Plage” - Anahid Nersessian

An examination of mid-20th-century institutional psychotherapy through the work of François Tosquelles at the Saint-Alban asylum. Nersessian contrasts this collective, creative model of care with today’s bureaucratic and pharmaceutical approaches to psychic suffering.

“Palaver Ecologies” - Joycelyn Longdon

A critique of the “relational drift” produced by extractive capitalism, Longdon proposes the African practice of palaver, ritualised collective dialogue, as a wayfinding technology for communal healing, ecological care and intergenerational resilience.

“Divorce!” - Asa Seresin

Seresin interrogates the rebranding of divorce as a luxury lifestyle and self-optimisation project, shaped by race and class privilege and detached from the realities of economic vulnerability and emotional rupture.

“Bog Theory” - David Lisbon

A meditation on the “bog” as a metaphor for contemporary media ecosystems. Lisbon contrasts ecological muddiness and historical layering with the sterile environments of surveillance capitalism, advocating for critical image literacy and sustained engagement with complexity.

“I Guess I Gotta Help Myself” - Ebun Sodipo

An account of self-help as a strategy of transgender survival in the UK’s hostile healthcare system. Sodipo documents DIY medical networks and “homebrewed” hormone practices as forms of necessity-driven autonomy and resistance to normative gender regimes.

Across the publication, contributors trace how care circulates unevenly, how responsibility is deferred, and how wellness can become a management strategy for enduring intolerable conditions.

This year, the Reader collaborates with artist Alake Shilling, who has designed a series of characters paired with original words of affirmation that were specially commissioned for this issue. Each copy will include one unique motivational sticker from a limited set of five designs from the series Everything is good, and rather splendid, 2025, created by Shilling.

Alake Shilling said: “Sometimes I feel guilty making art while the world around me burns. But I am here for the small bit of joy I can contribute. The stickers I made for Issue 02 hold that irony, how we try to have hope, even joy, while feeling like we have one foot in the grave. Life is duality; nothing is absolute. For me, I hope this finds you well is both sincere and questioning. I think the best care you can take of yourself is choosing to look toward the light, even when it’s dark. That’s something I practice often.”

Serpentine Reader is organised and edited by Hanna Girma, Senior Editor and Curator of Editorial Projects and designed by Louise Camu.