Explore Essays and memoir
Sort by:
Sort by:
Slime
Susanne Wedlich
‘We are all creatures of slime, but some of us are more creative than others’.
An excerpt from the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, Slime.
The Overspill
Elaine L. Wang
Elaine L. Wang remembers friendship, flag-raising ceremonies and class elections at elementary school in Beijing.
A Song About Singularities
Jack Underwood
‘Precious things, even those given to me lovingly, feel like a test.’
Jack Underwood on poetry and black holes.
An Ounce of Gold and Máxima Acuña Atalaya
Joseph Zárate
‘To end up with an ounce of gold – enough to make a wedding ring – you need to extract fifty tonnes of earth, or the contents of forty removal lorries.’
Laundry Bills and Manifestos
Francesca Wade
‘The great pleasure of archive work lies in searching for these secrets known and unknown.’
Disorientation
Ian Williams
‘The moment in childhood when one realizes that one is Black is profoundly disorienting.’
Best Book of 1480: MS Egerton 1821
Elvia Wilk
‘The original owners of many devotional books kissed, licked, rubbed, scratched at, and cried upon their pages.’ Elvia Wilk on the best book of 1480.
Survivors
Adam Weymouth
‘Salmon are the ultimate survivor. They’ve survived ice ages and cataclysms. But are they going to survive humans? It’s dubious, isn’t it?’
Upirngasaq (Arctic Spring)
Sheila Watt-Cloutier
‘Everyone benefits from a frozen Arctic. The future of the Arctic environment, and the Inuit it supports, is inextricably tied to the future of the planet.’
This Compost: Erotics of Rot
Elvia Wilk
‘Mushrooms sprout from the bathtub grout; disintegrating apples overflow from the trash can. Insects circle. The decomposition is lively and sensorially overwhelming.’
Between Light and Storm
Esther Woolfson
‘We’ve always been entwined in life and in death with other creatures, although often too much time has elapsed to be able to interpret with any certainty what some of these symbols and artefacts mean.’
