Explore Essays and memoir
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Yerevan, Armenia
Viken Berberian
‘Ever since the pandemic, our neighborhood is mostly deserted, except for the pigeons and statues.’
Daughter of Radium
Joe Dunthorne
‘As a child, my grandmother brushed her teeth every day with radioactive toothpaste.’
Mother-Wit
Jeffery Renard Allen
‘It would be many years before I understood that around my mother’s sober acceptance of the status quo was a whole culture she had developed for our subsistence and well-being.’
Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness?
Kevin Brazil
‘You never can wholly control the things you cling to. But you can figure out what has made you the surface you are.’
Notes on Craft
Naoise Dolan
‘If something is usually done in novels, but I can’t actively justify doing it, then I don’t do it.’
The Paternoster: A Requiem
Mark Blacklock
‘To step into a paternoster lift is to step into the circulatory system of a building, to become a part of its very structure.’
Carrot Bread
Annabel Banks
‘A short story is a loose-knit sweater, a trawler’s net, where the spaces and holes are inseparable from the whole.’
Introduction
Rana Dasgupta
‘We cherish communion, exchange and intercourse, of course, but also distance, seclusion and defence. Talk of membranes, therefore, is never entirely literal.’
You Are Here, You Are Not a Ghost
Mark Doty
‘Does it make you a little ghostly yourself, when what’s gone is more present for you than what’s here?’
All Species Have the Same Life
Emanuele Coccia
‘I have in me the vestiges of an endless series of living beings, all born of other living beings.’
The Pandemic, Our Common Story
Anna Badkhen
Anna Badkhen was researching Eden – the origins of humanity in the Afar Triangle of East Africa – when coronavirus broke out across the world.
