Explore Essays and memoir
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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.’
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.’
Rana Dasgupta on digital celebrity and a suicide in the banlieues of Paris.
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.’
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.’
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.’
Russia on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Liza Alexandrova-Zorina
‘The Russian people suffer from a victim complex: they believe that nothing depends on them, and by them nothing can be changed.’
Microtravel: Home and Away
Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo
‘The place I thought I knew best had become unknown territory, by the perhaps not-so-simple process of taking a few steps.’
I Am Lying
Miranda Doyle
‘Findings show that the bigger the brain, the more frequent the deceit.’ Miranda Doyle on why we lie.
Things I Didn’t Know
Wiam El-Tamami
‘When people would ask me what I was doing in Istanbul, I would explain that I’m a freelance writer and translator, and I move a lot. I move intuitively, I would say: places call to me.’
Elif Batuman | Is Travel Writing Dead?
Elif Batuman
‘The power imbalance built into travel writing is just a heightened version of an imbalance that’s there in all writing.’
Same-same but different | Discoveries
Ka Bradley
This week’s Discoveries features translation in all its many articulations.
