Explore Essays and memoir
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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.’
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.
Arrival Gates
Rebecca Solnit
‘It was like trying to go back to before the earthquake, to before knowledge.’
Be Careful with that Fan
Andre Perry
‘I was stuck in Texas for a month. The days passed like slow-motion films.
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.’
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.
Living Goddess
Isabella Tree
‘I longed to know what she was thinking, what she did all day when she wasn’t performing rituals.’
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.’
Nudity
Norman Rush
‘I nursed a precocious rage at the stratagems society was employing to keep me from seeing naked women.’
Teenage Wastelands
Jim Ruland
‘It took me seven years of marriage to figure out that my wife is a hardcore Pearl Jam fan.’