Explore Essays and memoir
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Africa’s Future Has No Space for Stupid Black Men
Pwaangulongii Dauod
‘The night was full of energy. The kind of energy that Africa needs to reinvent itself.’
After Maidan
Oliver Bullough
‘A woman asked the steward behind the registration desk if our flight to Moscow was domestic or international. “We are still working on that,” the man answered.’
Against Travel Writing
Robyn Davidson
’Shortly after its publication in 1980 I was surprised to learn that I had written a travel book’.
Agnès
René Belletto
‘Having told his story, the thief had said goodbye to Agnès, regretfully, she thought’.
Alexander Chee | Portrait of My Father
Alexander Chee
‘He left for the US while his father was away on business so he couldn’t stop him.’
Alive, Alive-Oh!
Diana Athill
‘She thought of herself as a rational woman, but while she could sleep alone in an empty house for night after night without worrying, there were other nights when her nerves twitched like a rabbit's at the least sound.’
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.’
America’s Secret War
Leslie Cockburn
‘Morales’s troubles began in the spring of 1984, when he was indicted for conspiracy to import and distribute cocaine. It was this awkward development that made him particularly receptive to the proposal he received from a delegation of Contras and a CIA man that turned up at his Opa-locka office soon after the bad news.’
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.’
An Ofrenda for my Mother
Sandra Cisneros
‘She was a prisoner-of-war mother, banging on the bars of her cell all her life.’