Explore Essays and memoir
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An Island Presence
Howard Cunnell
‘I can almost believe in the permanence of these warm days, this unchanging child whose hand fits mine. But I can feel the cold and the darkness coming.’
Crossing Borders
Carys Davies
Carys Davies on how the settlement of the American West can help us understand Donald Trump’s nativism.
Between Great Fires
William Atkins
‘This is the perennial anxiety – that at any moment, day or night, you might be snatched and shackled and tried and sent back.’
Rana Dasgupta | Is Travel Writing Dead?
Rana Dasgupta
‘This is a literature of checkpoints and fences, and the improvised gaps through which desperate people pass.’
Tara Bergin | Is Travel Writing Dead?
Tara Bergin
‘If you laugh and tell me I am only speaking metaphorically, I will reply: what other way do you expect me to speak?’
The Comrades and I
Mona Abouissa
Mona Abouissa on her experiences with Egyptian communists, and the role they played in Egypt before 1952, when they were excised from official history.
Best Book of 1982: Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Eleanor Chandler
‘While the terrible pain of speech is made clear, this book ultimately reminds us that we must not be silenced.’
Best Book of 1971: Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann
Kevin Breathnach
‘The novel submits to an internalized discipline: it is an observation machine’
Best Book of 2008: To the End of the Land, by David Grossman
Lily Dunn
‘David Grossman is a writer who speaks to the heart, and this is his masterpiece.’
Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse, by John Hawkes | Best Book of 1993
Linda H. Davis
‘Plunged inside the skin of the horse, I felt his sensory burdens, sufferings and fears: his keen sensitivity to sound, smell and touch (even the weight of a saddle)’
