Explore Essays and memoir
Sort by:
Sort by:
Remembering Iain M Banks
Stuart Kelly
Stuart Kelly remembers Iain Banks, and assesses the influence he's had on this generation of writers.
Brand Leader
Fintan O’Toole
‘It was a clear, uncomplicated space, a brand image, a label that could be stuck on a billion sauce bottles.’
Dr J
Kalpana Narayanan
‘My father has his own language for everything. When I finished my MFA, I was a NINJA: No Income, No Job, No Assets.’
The Weather in Mongolia
Philip Marsden
‘In Mongolian lore, winter lasts precisely eighty-one days: nine periods of nine days’.
The Ascent of Man
Joseph O’Neill
‘One June dusk in 1999 I found myself walking across a rice field near Fishing Pond, in east Trinidad, in the company of a game warden and a self-described naturalist-at-large sometimes known as the Turtle Man.’
Deeper into the Heart of Borneo (Part II)
Redmond O’Hanlon
‘James, resplendent in leopard skin and hornbill feathers, looked even more solemn than is his habit.’
Letter From Pondicherry, India
Akash Kapur
‘When I was growing up in Pondicherry, a former French colony on the south-east coast of India, I would go with my family each Sunday to the beach.‘
Dreams for Hire
Gabriel García Márquez
‘The wave had erupted with such force that it obliterated the glass lobby.‘ Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor.
Journal
Leonard Michaels
‘Of course I wouldn’t. It would be politically incorrect, as is anything really personal.’
Do I Owe You Something?
Michael Mewshaw
‘In the fall of 1971, Rome enjoyed an unbroken skein of bright crisp mornings and balmy afternoons that stretched on into November’.