Explore Essays and memoir
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All that Offers a Happy Ending Is a Fairy Tale
Yiyun Li
‘If you were like me, you would know the obsession of the compulsive reader: every street sign; every bottle label’
Best Book of 1900: The Autobiography of Dr William Henry Johnson
Jennifer Kabat
‘Johnson is now a ghost of history; he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, but I can’t let him disappear.’
Best Book of 1941: Consider the Oyster by M.F.K. Fisher
Harriet Moore
‘This book is about yearning for the Sunday nights of childhood, or dreams; it is a meditation on hunger in all its forms.’
Best book of 1964: Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr
Lisa McInerney
‘In days of such human cruelty and pettiness and stupidity, we need reminding that we are all capable of savage compassion as well as the contagion of hatred.’
Best Book of 1965: Everything That Rises Must Converge
April Ayers Lawson
‘O’Conner has for me the effect of nailing and then blowing up one’s most casual illusions’
Best book of 1983: The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
Sophie Mackintosh
‘After 2016 I’m done with sentimentality, and it’s hard to think of a less sentimental book than The Piano Teacher, objectively a masterpiece, subjectively a book that changed my life.’
Best Book of 1998: 253
Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado on why Geoff Ryman’s 253 is the best book of 1998.
Best Book of 2000: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
Anne Meadows
‘It is the novel I have read which best expresses the honest and sad truth of art: that it is often produced in precarity and performed in near silence, but that it can also redeem a life.’
Best Book of 2015: Thus Were Their Faces by Silvina Ocampo
Valerie Miles
‘Time is a rubber band, and in a single sentence, ghosts and alternative worlds superimpose’
Best Book of 2016: Joanne Kyger’s On Time
Hoa Nguyen
Hoa Nguyen on why Joanne Kyger’s On Time is the best book of 2016.
Best Story of 1992: ‘Mlle. Dias de Corta’
Mary O’Donoghue
Mary O’Donoghue on why Mavis Gallant‘s ‘Mlle. Dias de Corta’ is the best story of 1992.
First Sentence: Mary O’Donoghue
Mary O’Donoghue
‘It’s the small stuff – and here I mean the odd particulate matter of daily life – that lets me access the sprawl of a place that wasn’t mine but has incrementally become so.’