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Explore Essays and memoir

Common Cyborg

Jillian Weise

‘I’m nervous at night when I take off my leg. I wait until the last moment before sleep to un-tech because I am a woman who lives alone’

On the Trouble of Bound Association

Lisa Wells

‘We cannot know our era as it’s unfolding.’

Five are the fingers, and five are the sins

Rebecca Watson

Rebecca Watson on the life of the man who prototyped fascism, the Italian writer Gabriele D’Annunzio

The Unpunished Vice

Edmund White

‘Reading is at once a lonely and an intensely sociable act.’

Root and Branch

Sana Valiulina

‘I am my father’s daughter, a former prisoner of war and “suspicious person” who spent ten years in the Gulag.’ Translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon.

Speedy

Evie Wyld

‘Speedy wanted to swallow the world.’

Magpie

Esther Woolfson

‘His life was one of calculation and endeavour, of learning and watching, remembering and trying.’

Clean

Matt Young

An excerpt from Matt Young's memoir Eat The Apple, which explores his three deployments to Iraq as a member of the US Marine Corps.

Morwari Zafar | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Morwari Zafar

‘What satellites and the internet don’t do is give a voice to experience. And that’s where travel writing endures.’

Sara Wheeler | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Sara Wheeler

‘Mass travel has liberated the form. No amount of package tours will stop ordinary life quietly continuing everywhere on earth.’

Forbidden Games

Tia Wallman

‘We do not understand why, nor did we covet such long life, but here we are, our respective addictions and madness with us to the end.’

Since Everything Was Suddening Into A Hurricane

Binyavanga Wainaina

After a sudden stroke, Binyavanga Wainaina and his lover travel to Nairobi to reconcile with his father.

Alexis Wright | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Alexis Wright

‘In my imagination I have been to many villages and cities in the world.’

Best Book of 1926: Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel

Sun Yisheng

His is a force more penetrative than all the bogus machismo of Hemingway.