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Explore Essays and memoir

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.’

A Confession

Jess Row

‘I walk out of the theatre in a daze. I’ve glimpsed something. But a glimpse, as it turns out, is not enough.’

Nudity

Norman Rush

‘I nursed a precocious rage at the stratagems society was employing to keep me from seeing naked women.’