Explore essays and memoir
Karen Olsson | Notes on Craft
Karen Olsson
Karen Olsson shares her notes on the craft of writing: ‘Every book is an unsolvable problem, and yet every time I convince myself I’m just on the verge of cracking it.’
Night on Fire
Darcey Steinke
‘I know what’s going to happen and I know that it’s going to be bizarre.’
Stuck in Trees (with Apologies to Ian Frazier)
Jessica Francis Kane
‘On 8 January 2018, I noticed a large bunch of purple balloons in a tree near my apartment building.’
The Resurgence of the Monstrous Feminine
Hannah Williams
‘Despite the sheer and uncommunicable amount of violence enacted upon the female body throughout history, it’s woman as terroriser, as beast, that we keep coming back to.’
Boxing
Fatima Farheen Mirza
Fatima Farheen Mirza on navigating gender roles in a Muslim family, wearing hijab and learning how to box.
The Way to the Sea
Caroline Crampton
‘Alone in the silent dark, she traversed the mouth of the estuary in mile-long sweeps, making a little more progress up the river each time she turned. Wind and tide were pushing her away, back towards the sea.’
Mother and Son:
Life and Fate
Robert Chandler
‘Nothing made her happier than to sacrifice herself for her son’s happiness.’
Distributed Denial of Service
Merritt Tierce
‘Once you learn to seal the shell, to make it watertight, you can let anything roil around in there.’
The Ungrateful Refugee
Dina Nayeri
‘I was born in 1979, a year of revolution, and grew up in wartime.’ Dina Nayeri on growing up in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
How I Write My Books
Anne Serre
Anne Serre on how she writes. Translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson.
Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness
Zanele Muholi & Anne McNeill
‘Zanele Muholi is a photographer, often described as one of the most powerful visual activists of our time, and a long-time advocate for their black LGBTQ+ community.’
To Zinder
Sven Lindqvist
Obsessed with a single line from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness – Kurtz’s injunction to ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ – Sven Lindqvist set out across Central Africa, and wrote a book that revealed precisely what Europe’s imperial powers had exacted on Africa’s people over the course of the preceding two centuries.
Pajtim Statovci | Notes on Craft
Pajtim Statovci
‘My childhood was pierced not only by the violence in Kosovo but also by the violence my immigrant family was confronted with in Finland.’
The Fall of Saigon
James Fenton
‘I wanted to see a communist victory, which I presumed to be inevitable. I wanted to see the fall of a city.’
Tadpoles
Primo Levi
‘It was a harsh and brutal puberty: the tiny creatures began to fret, as if an inner sense had forewarned them of the torment in store’
The Imam and the Indian
Amitav Ghosh
‘We were both travelling, he and I: we were travelling in the West. The only difference was that I had actually been there, in person.’
His Roth
Philip Roth
‘I naively believed as a child that I would always have a father present, and the truth seems to be that I always will.’
Glitches
John Gregory Dunne
‘I prefer not to speculate about what might have happened if I had not taken the ECG.’
The Snow in Ghana
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘We always carry it to foreign countries, all over the world, our pride and our powerlessness.’ Translated from the Polish by William Brand.
The Zoo in Basel
John Berger
‘To create is to let take over something which did not exist before and is therefore new.’
Dreams for Hire
Gabriel García Márquez
‘The wave had erupted with such force that it obliterated the glass lobby.‘ Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor.
Editorial
Bill Buford
Bill Buford on his decision to resign as editor of this magazine, which he relaunched in its present form in 1979.
Where is Kigali?
Lindsey Hilsum
‘Evariste was the nightwatchman. He and I were alone in the house in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, when the killing started.’
Those Who Felt Differently
Ian Jack
‘Could grief for one woman have caused all this? We were told so.’
Self-Consciousness
Edward W. Said
‘It was through my mother that I grew more aware of my body as incredibly fraught and problematic.‘
Editing Vidia
Diana Athill
‘I thought so highly of Vidia’s writing and felt his presence on our list to be so important that I simply could not allow myself not to like him.’
