Explore Essays and memoir
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Outside the Whale
Salman Rushdie
‘For a man as truthful, direct, intelligent, passionate and sane as Orwell, ‘politics’ had come to represent the antithesis of his own world-view.’
Frankenstein’s Mother
Darcey Steinke
‘If pain is what makes others real to us, there was not another human being more real to me than my mother.’
Tommy
Donald Ray Pollock
‘I began working at the Mead Paper Company in Chillicothe, Ohio, in the summer of 1973.’
How to be Gay and Indian
Manil Suri
‘This was supposed to be my great in-your-face coming-out campaign, which I’d fretted over for months beforehand. Had India suddenly lost its conservativeness, turned enlightened, even hip?’
Jim Magee’s Hill
Pamela Petro
‘No one who’s seen The Hill has been able to describe it to me without visceral discomfort. Actually, no one’s been able to describe it at all.’
Famished Eels
Mary Rokonadravu
‘After one hundred years, this is what I have: a daguerreotype of her in bridal finery; a few stories told and retold in plantations, kitchens, hospitals, airport lounges.’
The Ambivalent
Paulo Scott
‘He not only sees the World Cup as a ceasefire, but also as a series of sleights of hand that hide what’s really going on, political debauchery, spin and chicanery.’
Cold Storage
Oliver Sacks
‘Uncle Toby was alive, but suspended, apparently, in some strange icy stupor.’
Scarp | New Voices
Nick Papadimitriou
‘His imagination lingers in the woods and fields like a slowly drifting plant community and then dissolves into ditches lined with black waterlogged leaves – a residue of previous summers – and the ghosts of dead insects.’
Constitutional
Helen Simpson
‘The thing about a circular walk is that you end up where you started.’