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Explore Essays and memoir

When We Fight, We Have Our Children With Us

Madeline ffitch

‘We are all politically involved whether we like it or not, and children are already on the frontlines.’

Anosh Irani | Notes on Craft

Anosh Irani

‘The interiority that we keep speaking of in fiction is built on pain’

Tshinanu

Naomi Fontaine

‘Language is a risk that a nation takes. If a language survives, its people do too.’ Translated from the French by David Homel.

Tshinanu

Naomi Fontaine

Plus tard, ils me diront comme tu étais un grand homme. Un savant. Un érudit de la chasse.

The File: Lost Then Found

A.M. Homes

‘Even for those of us who feel we have integrated our history, there can be fragments, like shrapnel, that push to the surface without warning.’

Language In Exile

Mireille Gansel

One summer’s day, for the first time, Mitzi broached the past. Past in the present, so present, with everything it had deposited in this room that suddenly seemed so vast. Everything that the grim tide deposits on the shores of a life.

The Survivals of Lafcadio Hearn

Kenny Fries

‘Did Hearn feel comfortable in Japan because being a foreigner overshadowed his physical difference?’

Out of the Cell

Pico Iyer

‘I was inside a silence that was not an absence of noise so much as the living presence of everything I habitually walked – or sleep-walked – past.’

Water, Water, Everywhere

Darrell Hartman

Darrell Hartman on water: from diving to climate change, hurricanes Irma and Harvey to the advent of ‘Blue Mind’.

Second Mother

Sinéad Gleeson

‘The cortex shrinks where the cells used to be. The spaces in between expand. Islands in the sea of the mind. An archipelago of the former self.’ Sinéad Gleeson on Alzheimer's disease.

Sympathy | State of Mind

Rachel Hewitt

‘Before motherhood, I had not thought much about sympathy.’

A Mingling | State of Mind

Siri Hustvedt

‘My empathy may become a vehicle of insight for me and therefore help me to help you or it may debilitate me altogether, make me so sad I am no good to you whatsoever.’

The Recall of Herman Harcourt

Colin Grant

‘I had the queer feeling of looking into a mirror of the projected future, of perhaps seeing how easily his fall could be a rehearsal for my own.’

Monster | State of Mind

Margo Jefferson

‘Today’s a day for you to feel blocked and impeded; a coward in work and love; resenting duty; suspecting pleasure.’