Explore Essays and memoir
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Letter from Greece
Meaghan Delahunt
‘The only thing between Greece and total collapse is the Greek family.’
The First Sense
Robyn Davidson
‘Hearing, they say, is the first of the senses we develop in the womb.’
The Plano Suicides
Stefan Merrill Block
‘My parents moved us to Plano for the reasons so many move to Plano: jobs, good schools, a town perfectly engineered to render successful families.’
Under Eastern Eyes
Timothy Garton Ash
‘They sit around, feet in slippers, drinking wine and swapping jokes about Chernobyl. They have just produced the best journal of new writing in Czechoslovakia. It took about twenty minutes.’
Winter
Rich Cohen
‘When everyone was asleep, we put on our boots and waded out into the drifts of Glencoe – a suburban street remade into an eerie winter-scape.’
The Tailor of Gujarat
Amit Chaudhuri
‘He was desperate for the photograph to cease to exist: as if the man in the photo and he are competing for the same oxygen.’
Mao Comes to Sydney
Georgia Blain
‘After all, it was only politics, and I was too young to understand.’
Undoing the folded lie: Poetry after 9/11
Rachael Allen
‘The real feeling of a day that changed everything forever is boiled down so incessantly, and so often, to cliché.’
Fat Girls in Des Moines
Bill Bryson
‘When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn't come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a Mecca of cosmopolitanism, a dynamic hub of wealth and education, where people wear three-piece suits and dark socks, often simultaneously.’
Blood
Urvashi Butalia
‘Stories are all that people have, stories that rarely breach the frontiers of family and religious community’
