Explore essays and memoir
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 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.’
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 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.’
Jenni Fagan | My Writing Playlist
Jenni Fagan
Best of Young British Novelist Jenni Fagan selects five songs that she loves to write to.
Do Fish Feel Pain?
James Hamilton-Paterson
‘Our mistake in this debate is to think that these issues can be resolved by science and ethics and the passing of nice clear laws’.
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’
Footplacers, London Transport, Owls, Wincer-Boise
Russell Hoban
‘All those footsteps have been gathered up into the footplacer, all those goings are gone.’
The House by the Gallows
Intizar Hussain
‘Along with religion, an unthinking nationalism had become the other god of Pakistan.’
Doing the Paperwork: Life in the aftermath of a violent death
David Goldblatt
‘If the pressure of their life didn’t kill her it made the fight too hard.’
India! The Golden Jubilee: Introduction
Ian Jack
‘I first went to India twenty years ago as a reporter.’
Asking for it
James Hamilton-Paterson
‘Having my hair cut one morning in February 1999, I fell foul of one of those barber-shop discussions which are a feature of life here in Italy’.
Foreigners
Daniel Gascón
‘It would’ve been a magical moment if my neighbours hadn’t started fucking at that very second.’
Road to Cambodia
James Fenton
‘The buildings were full of surprises. In one, surrounded by winking lights, the last abbot was lying in his coffin. He had died a year before, and it would be another two years before he was cremated.’
White into Black
Martha Gellhorn
‘It is hard to believe that, in 1952, there were only two places on earth where blacks could not be insulted or mistreated simply because of their colour: Haiti and Liberia.’
An Unfathomable Ship
Uwe Johnson
‘It is the name of an American ammunition ship which went aground in the summer of 1944; as a result the ship sank, since which time only the tips of its derricks and masts and a corner of the bridge are visible.’
The Imam And The Indian
Amitav Ghosh
‘We were both travelling, he and I: we were travelling in the West. The only difference was that I had actually been there, in person.’
Janesville, Wisconsin
Steven Greenhouse
‘To them, the emphasis was on the ‘creative’ part of creative destruction. But in Janesville, few could see beyond the destruction.’
The Politics of Grief
V. V. Ganeshananthan
‘It is a way of humiliating people, to say that their dead are not dead, to say that people are not even allowed to mourn.’
Motley Notes
Ian Jack
‘The last issue of Granta celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary and retraced a little of its pre-1979 history as a magazine for and by the students of Cambridge University.’
A Dynasty of Album Cover Art
Lemi Ghariokwu
‘The music is as powerful as it gets and beneath his knife-edge, cutting sarcasm, Fela’s voice rages.’
I Like Being a Woman (And I Hate Hysterical Women)
Leila Guerriero
‘One day my father called me over to explain to me about the little seed, patting my head as if he were offering me his condolences.’
