Explore essays and memoir
Pop-Up People
Peter Pomerantsev
We are living through a period of pop-up populism, where each political movement redefines ‘the Many’ and ‘the People’, where we are always reconsidering who counts as an ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’, where what it means to belong is never certain.
Nothing to be afraid of | State of Mind
Anil K. Seth
‘Life in the first person is both magical and terrifying. But it is circumscribed.’ Anil K. Seth on the ties between our brains, bodies and consciousness.
Soon Comes Night
Ekow Eshun
‘I’d become so used to hiding away inside myself I couldn’t respond with any spontaneity. I was stuck in the shallows of my emotions.’ Ekow Eshun on success, night terrors and therapy.
Summer
Molly Antopol
‘Maybe you heard about the sticks of dynamite he set along military rail routes, waiting for them to spark and explode.’ New flash fiction from Molly Antopol
Introduction
Sigrid Rausing
‘What’s in a state of mind? How do we describe emotions, or the complex relationship between individuals and the state?’
Notes on a Suicide
Rana Dasgupta
‘The problem was that, for the most part, it did not matter how widely broadcast your discontent was: no one cared.’
One Picture, A Thousand Words
Charles Glass
‘I think they are not on the right path. It’s wrong. What they are doing is wrong.’
Out of the Cradle
John Barth
‘What had formerly been a sedative, a tranquilizing soporific, had morphed into a facilitator of reflection, contemplation, deliberation, even inspiration.’
A Mingling | State of Mind
Siri Hustvedt
‘My empathy may become a vehicle of insight for me and therefore help me to help you or it may debilitate me altogether, make me so sad I am no good to you whatsoever.’
Salvage
Reynaldo Rivera & Chris Kraus
‘Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Reynaldo photographed his world, a world that no longer exists in LA.’ Photographs by Reynaldo Rivera, introduced by Chris Kraus.
The Recall of Herman Harcourt
Colin Grant
‘I had the queer feeling of looking into a mirror of the projected future, of perhaps seeing how easily his fall could be a rehearsal for my own.’
Cyprus United
Joe Dunthorne
‘The idea that football might provide an opportunity to overcome our dumber instincts seemed ridiculous now: football was a chance to set our idiocy free.’
Monster | State of Mind
Margo Jefferson
‘Today’s a day for you to feel blocked and impeded; a coward in work and love; resenting duty; suspecting pleasure.’
Coming Home to the Counter-Revolution
Jack Shenker
‘My Cairo is an inverted city, one that wears its innards above the skin.’
Mistaken | State of Mind
Mary Ruefle
‘I was in the beginning named after someone else who was named Mary but I was neither this person nor the one they called Mary after her.’
Imagined Memories
Francesca Todde & Nuar Alsadir
‘The creation of a screen memory is an encoding process: the screen retains all that is important from the past, but in encrypted form.’ Nuar Alsadir introduces the photographs of Francesca Todde.
Gay and Depressed | State of Mind
Andrew Solomon
‘It would be a bit more tolerable if we lived in a society that didn’t blame depression on its victims.’
Brother | State of Mind
Max Porter
‘We don’t often talk seriously or in depth about our childhood these days, but we know we could, and we know what good it did us.’
Chère Madame
Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust’s letters to his neighbour, translated from the French by Lydia Davis.
Books Do Furnish a Room
Penelope Lively
‘The shelves say something about the person who has stocked them; they say much.’
Threshold | State of Mind
Barry Lopez
‘What we’re about to see is greater than the thing you’re running from.’
The Peripatetic Penelope Fitzgerald
Lucy Scholes
Lucy Scholes on the highs, lows and package tours of Booker-prize-winning author Penelope Fitzgerald. ‘Fitzgerald’s life can only be attributed to the caprices of fate.’
Dead in Venice
Masahiko Shimada
‘If I wasn’t a fish spawned in the Brenta river, why was I so compelled to keep returning?’ Masahiko Shimada on his many trips to Venice.
Talking Italish
Antonio Melechi
‘For my mother and father, the past and present had both become foreign countries.’
Brontez Purnell Is Everything
Michelle Tea
Novelist, zinester, dancer, go-go-boy, punk, filmmaker, actor, performer, Brontez Purnell is everything.
Amit Chaudhuri | First Sentence
Amit Chaudhuri
‘A scene in which nothing is ostensibly happening will absorb me; so will a paragraph that contains no vital piece of information.’
The Tamarind is Always Sour
Keane Shum
‘By law, the more than one million Rohingya in Myanmar are almost all excluded from Myanmar citizenship, making them the largest stateless group in the world.’
