Explore Essays and memoir
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Self-Made Man
Mark Gevisser
Mark Gevisser examines the personal, political and social issues of transgender identity in America.
Scavengers
Adam Johnson
‘I was dying to buy something, anything that would help my wife and children understand the profound surrealism and warped reality I’d experienced on my research trip to North Korea.’
Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road
Russell Hoban
‘Music is a puissant recaller of time past; music is memory's sister and for its very life relies on memory to hold in our minds the passage of sounds through time.’
The Cage of You
Kerry Howley
‘They treated their bodies like some exotic animal they’d found fast asleep, beings they needed to wake to truly know.’
The Highway of Brotherhood and Unity
Michael Ignatieff
‘Back in 1989, we thought the new world opened up by the breaching of the Berlin Wall would be ruled by philosopher kings, dissident heroes and shipyard electricians.’
Do Fish Feel Pain?
James Hamilton-Paterson
‘There will always be an unbridgeable conceptual gap between our unique species and the rest.’
Jenni Fagan | My Writing Playlist
Jenni Fagan
Best of Young British Novelist Jenni Fagan selects five songs that she loves to write to.
The General
Isabel Hilton
‘The kitchen telephone would ring and it would be Gustavo Stroessner, the General's son, bellowing in that strange accent down a fuzzy line from Brazil, like an unruly fictional character nagging for a larger part in the plot.’
Seven Days in Syria
Janine di Giovanni
‘I had come to Syria because I wanted to see a country before it tumbled down the rabbit hole of war’