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Explore Essays and memoir

Fire and Ice

Debra Gwartney

‘The rental house is where he would die.’

Debra Gwartney on the last days of Barry Lopez.

Notes on Craft

Oli Hazzard

Poet Oli Hazzard on writing his debut novel Lorem Ipsum, which is made up of one single 50,000-word sentence.

Black Box

Shiori Ito

Shiori Ito has become integral to the #MeToo movement taking hold in Japan.

The Stinky Ocean

Ian Jack

‘It was a peculiar, alopecic landscape of hummocks and gullies, with patches of grass growing on what looked like white earth, and rarely a soul to be seen.’

When the Cholera Came

Lindsey Hilsum

‘It was hard not to wonder if the disease was a kind of divine retribution – collective punishment for a collective crime.’

Abbandonati

Rory Gleeson

‘One day, 200 people’s X-rays showed they needed intensive care in order to survive.’

The Mezzanine, or: The Most Important Book About Nothing You’ll Ever Read

Joel Golby

‘It’s like taking an escalator trip into someone else’s mind for an hour, finding nothing of actual substance up there, and realising, as you retreat mournfully back into your own skull, that there’s nothing there, either.’

Notes on Craft

Ho Sok Fong

‘While writing we recover memories, recover moods, and we start to interpret them.’

The Lye of the Land

Derek Gow

‘One in seven British species is now threatened with extinction. Many more, from the grey wolf to the blue stag beetle, are already long gone.’

The Wolf at the Door

Cal Flyn

‘Wolves brook no bureaucracy. They do not believe in borders. It has been years since we have come face to face with apex predators in our own country.’

The Dragon’s Den

Tim Flannery

‘Just imagine the Australian inland with herds of rhino-sized diprotodon, as well as other gigantic marsupials, being preyed on by marsupial lions and Komodo dragons.’

Surviving Autocracy

Masha Gessen

We knew Trump’s range: government by gesture; obfuscation and lying; self-praise; stoking fear and issuing threats.

1 April 2020

Michael Hofmann

‘Living on money from the government, excused our duties and our liabilities, reducing our wants to eating and sleeping and what in the eighteenth century may have passed for exercise, the alderman’s stroll.’

Le Flottement

Janine di Giovanni

‘Their lives were halted in time, a predicament they accepted with grace, sometimes even with humor. They appeared to be floating.’