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Explore Essays and memoir

Best Book of 1990: Anecdotes of Modern Art

Natalie Shapero

‘If I tell you a book is an encyclopedic and fast-paced tour of the interrelationship of making art and being in pain, need I say more?’

Best book of 1936: Locos

Ingrid Persaud

Ingrid Persaud on why Felipe Alfau’s Locos is the best book of 1936.

Best Book of 1969: Pricksongs & Descants

Lisa Taddeo

Lisa Taddeo on why Robert Coover’s Pricksongs & Descants is the best book of 1969.

Mountains Don’t Know Borders

Lois Parshley

‘In the Balkans, the present is often perched precariously on top of the past.’

Letter to Razan Zaitouneh

Kamila Shamsie

PEN International’s Day of the Imprisoned Writer – we stand in solidarity with writers who have suffered persecution exercising their freedom of expression.

Ten Books that Changed the World

Martin Puchner

Martin Puchner on ten books that have changed the course of world history.

Mangilaluk’s Highway

Nadim Roberts

‘They joked about how tough they’d be by the time they got home.’

The Book Tree

Larry Tremblay

‘I dreamed of dictionaries. I crammed myself with liquorice, honeymoons, caramels.’

L’Arbre aux livres

Larry Tremblay

En ce temps si proche, Dieu était partout et personne ne pouvait l’assassiner.

Explain Her to Me

Lucy Scholes

Lucy Scholes on Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo and Rebecca Solnit

Getting Away With It

Timothy Phillips

A case of Russian espionage from Tim Phillips' book The Secret Twenties: British Intelligence, the Russians, and the Jazz Age.

Desire | State of Mind

Andrea Stuart

‘My burgeoning sense of my own attractiveness, so fragile and recently developed, withered in this less than fertile ground.’

Pop-Up People

Peter Pomerantsev

We are living through a period of pop-up populism, where each political movement redefines ‘the Many’ and ‘the People’, where we are always reconsidering who counts as an ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’, where what it means to belong is never certain.

Nothing to be afraid of | State of Mind

Anil K. Seth

‘Life in the first person is both magical and terrifying. But it is circumscribed.’ Anil K. Seth on the ties between our brains, bodies and consciousness.