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Explore Essays and memoir

Writing While Worried

Fanny Britt

‘Just as it can spur me on, worry is adept at stifling and silencing.’

What is it that hurts?

France Daigle

‘Our visibility and our affirmation as a people is established through our language.’

The Canada Pictures

Douglas Coupland

‘In the year leading up to this I started collecting objects that, in some way, evoked a sense of Canadianness in me.’

Écrire Avec Facultés Affaiblies

Fanny Britt

Comme il a grandi, j’ai pensé, puis j’ai passé la débarbouillette sous l’eau tiède du lavabo de la salle de bain.

Clown School

Nuar Alsadir

Political resistance, poetry, self-revelation all spring from that provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints.

Davos Woman

Trisha De Borchgrave

‘Did she process my gentle hand in the same way as the objectifying touch of the men before me? Did she know the difference?’

Prozac Culture

Brian Dillon

Brian Dillon on the Prozac craze of the 90s, and his experience taking the infamous antidepressant.

Trollhättan

Andrew Brown

Andrew Brown on Swedish society and the Trollhättan school attack.

Soon Comes Night

Ekow Eshun

‘I’d become so used to hiding away inside myself I couldn’t respond with any spontaneity. I was stuck in the shallows of my emotions.’

Notes on a Suicide

Rana Dasgupta

‘The problem was that, for the most part, it did not matter how widely broadcast your discontent was: no one cared.’

Rana Dasgupta on digital celebrity and a suicide in the banlieues of Paris.

Out of the Cradle

John Barth

‘What had formerly been a sedative, a tranquilizing soporific, had morphed into a facilitator of reflection, contemplation, deliberation, even inspiration.’

Cyprus United

Joe Dunthorne

‘The idea that football might provide an opportunity to overcome our dumber instincts seemed ridiculous now: football was a chance to set our idiocy free.’

Amit Chaudhuri | First Sentence

Amit Chaudhuri

‘A scene in which nothing is ostensibly happening will absorb me; so will a paragraph that contains no vital piece of information.’

Russia on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Liza Alexandrova-Zorina

‘The Russian people suffer from a victim complex: they believe that nothing depends on them, and by them nothing can be changed.’