Explore Essays and memoir
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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.’
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.’
Living Goddess
Isabella Tree
‘I longed to know what she was thinking, what she did all day when she wasn’t performing rituals.’
A Place on Earth: Scenes from a War
Anjan Sundaram
Dense forest and formless roads lead Anjan Sundaram to the sites of conflict in the Central African Republic in 2014.
Key Stroke
Will Self
Striking the keys of the same typewriter that once sat under J.G. Ballard’s fingers, Will Self reimagines the legendary writer’s last days.
Be Careful with that Fan
Andre Perry
‘I was stuck in Texas for a month. The days passed like slow-motion films.
Mona Simpson | First Sentence
Mona Simpson
‘A year later, still in third person, I’d taken five days off my character’s long wait. I’d moved to present tense, though, for more immediacy.’
The Defeated
Jonny Steinberg
‘Peter Mitchell died on a frontier, not so much between black and white, or between the landed and the landless, as between the past and the future.’
Tourist
Andrea Stuart
‘My curiosity about lesbianism was an accomplice of my feminism: a path that allowed me to be sexual and free.’