Explore Essays and memoir
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My Chess Teacher
Ricardo Lísias
‘The environment, however, wasn’t a hostile one. Though it was filled with the strangest guys in town, they were only there to play.’
Cynthia Ozick | First Sentence
Cynthia Ozick
‘Some stories begin with an incident, or a set of enigmatic circumstances, or a scene indelibly witnessed, or the relationship of unlike temperaments, or even something as gossamer as a mood. And then there is the kind of story that is rooted in an idea.’
The Question of Fate
Catherine Lacey
‘The possibility that I’d unwittingly tapped into her fate and used it as fuel for a story sickened me.’
Blood Is Usually Red
Katherine Faw Morris
‘A lot of babies were born in skiffs during storms, their umbilical cords cut with rusty pocketknives.’
Melinda Moustakis | First Sentence
Melinda Moustakis
‘We all would like to think that with one line, one brush, we could make a reader fall madly in love, and there are writers that elicit such a response with the appropriately gorgeous.’
Chasing Wolves in the American West
Adam Nicolson
‘It is the wildest part of the American South-West and, in a way, its most beautiful.’
Sasayama
Nadifa Mohamed
‘It was in one of those listless summers after graduation that I found myself in the small Japanese town of Sasayama.’
The Casualties
Katie Kitamura
‘The following are some of the Japanese players who also appeared in the major leagues during the Age of Ichiro.’
The Power of a Grandmother Named Tranquilina
Valerie Miles
'Never underestimate the power of a grandmother to leave her mark on coming generations, or the taste of her cooking to cause an epiphany big enough to give the world a shiver.'
Blue Moon
Hiromi Kawakami
‘Rather than death itself, it is the disappearance of traces that seems unbearable and sad. The disappearance of all signs that I existed.’