Explore Essays and memoir
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Writing Like Degas Paints
Sulaiman Addonia
Sulaiman Addonia on how Edgar Degas’s nude portraits inspired his latest novel, Silence Is My Mother Tongue.
Mr Wu
Pallavi Aiyar
‘A middle-aged woman in teddy bear-spangled pajamas came hurtling down on a flatbed tricycle.’ Pallavi Aiyar returns to her old Beijing hutong.
since feeling is first
Nuar Alsadir
‘The way we manage erotic knowledge is connected to our handling of unwanted truths’
I Will Never See the World Again
Ahmet Altan
‘I was in a cage because a man had eaten an apple.’ Translated from the Turkish by Yasemin Çongar.
The Editor’s Chair: On Christine Montalbetti
Alex Andriesse
‘For Montalbetti to have achieved this syntactic ease in French is a feat. For the translator to reproduce it in English requires the capacities of a medium.’
On Rihanna
Alexia Arthurs
‘Rihanna had cut her hair short, and she was no longer being marketed as the Caribbean Beyoncé.’
Dog
Nadeem Aslam
‘More than once the new dog was aggressive, a stab of fire, but I did not tell the grown-ups. I feared they would take him away.’
Who Killed Tolstoy?
Elif Batuman
‘I walked along the birch-lined alleys of Yasnaya Polyana, looking for clues. Snakes were swimming in the pond, making a rippling pattern. Everything here was a museum.’
What Do Women Want?
Devorah Baum
‘What we’re arguing about turns out to be how to speak to each other at all.’
Breasts: A History
Krys Malcolm Belc
‘My breasts are shrinking. As my fat redistributes it settles in my belly and leaves my chest.’