Explore Essays and memoir
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Aliens and Us
Ken Thompson
‘Japanese knotweed is a terrific late-season source of nectar for both bees and hoverflies, but that’s not much of a headline, is it?’
Work, or the Swet Shop Boys
Hilary Plum
‘My work life – like, maybe, yours – is built around another, non-paying vocation.’
Roses
Legacy Russell
‘What if we are not ‘well-behaved’? What then?’
Legacy Russell on her father and the FBI.
People From My Neighbourhood: Behind the Scenes
Clare Skeats
Clare Skeats on the cover design for Hiromi Kawakami’s latest book of stories, translated by Ted Goossen.
Introduction
Sigrid Rausing
‘But soon everything that had felt so tragic and dramatic to begin with – thousands of people ill and dying, the great pause, the intense dreams, the solidarity clapping – came to feel normal.’
Still Life
Leanne Shapton
‘Because that’s what I’m doing a lot of; looking around the interiors I occupy, the corners of my occupied apartment.’
The Poetry Vaccine
Peter Pomerantsev
‘The quarantine and the closure of borders was giving my father Cold War flashbacks. And while Covid-19 was reducing life and death to statistics, father was using literature to affirm individuality.’
An Education
Ariel Saramandi
‘Once, early on, before he learned such things were never said, my brother approached a white boy in his class with my mother’s maiden name and said they must be cousins. The violence in my family’s home started a year or so later.’
Commuting Through Coronavirus
Kikuko Tsumura
‘My friend and her colleagues are being told not to get infected. Infections among employees will affect the company’s reputation, and would be an inconvenience to clients.’
Notes on Craft
Alan Rossi
‘The whole universe emerges and lives through this little consciousness that we call our self.’
I Remember
Georges Perec
Entries from Georges Perec’s I Remember, translated from the French by Philip Terry and David Bellos.
Diary of a London Lockdown
Poppy Sebag-Montefiore
‘The coronavirus seemed to demand immediate responses to the questions we’d been struggling with for years.’
