Explore Essays and memoir
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Cracking Up
Kevin Breathnach
‘It has been several weeks since I slept for more than an hour, and lately I’ve been feeling on the verge of cracking up.’
The Raingod’s Green, Dark as Passion
Kevin Barry
‘If cities are sexed, as Jan Morris believes, then Cork is a male place. Personified further, I would cast him as low-sized, disputatious and stoutly built, a hard-to-knock-over type.’
On Sonnet 50
Paula Bohince
‘I love Shakespeare’s slow insistence, which mirrors the action within the poem: there is nothing but grief to reach.’ Paula Bohince on Shakespeare’s sonnet 50.
Crossings
Tim Beckett
‘This was the collective trauma of a community discovering, very abruptly, they’d have to uproot their lives.’ Tim Beckett on the ruins of Uranium City.
Violence in Blue
Patrick Ball
‘One-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police.’
Five Things Right Now: Diane Cook
Diane Cook
Diane Cook shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.
Bucharest, Broken City
Philip Ó Ceallaigh
‘It is only consciousness and memory that hold together the things we sometimes see as solid.’
Coventry
Rachel Cusk
‘War is a narrative: it might almost be said to embody the narrative principle itself.’
The Secret Afterlife of Boats
Anna Badkhen
‘The sea is broken,’ they say. An empty net at night: a drooping lattice of shiny nothingness, a cold and worthless tinsel mesh.
Best Book of 2000: The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent
Will Boast
Will Boast on why Lionel Trilling’s The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent is the best book of 2000.
