Explore Essays and memoir
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A Portrait of My Mother
Michael Collins (Photographer)
Photographer Michael Collins on his mother’s life following a series of strokes.
Mother-Wit
Jeffery Renard Allen
‘It would be many years before I understood that around my mother’s sober acceptance of the status quo was a whole culture she had developed for our subsistence and well-being.’
Cheating
Ahmet Altan
‘I get into the police car with four officers from the Anti-Terrorism Branch. They are taking me to the prison.’
The Only Way Out Is Through
Hana Pera Aoake
‘Hiding in kumara pits on the side of volcanoes, I was born with an egg inside me ready to be baked.’
The Pandemic, Our Common Story
Anna Badkhen
Anna Badkhen was researching Eden – the origins of humanity in the Afar Triangle of East Africa – when coronavirus broke out across the world.
Carrot Bread
Annabel Banks
‘A short story is a loose-knit sweater, a trawler’s net, where the spaces and holes are inseparable from the whole.’
The Possibility of an Emperor
Patrick Barkham
‘I had always been told that the purple emperor was rare because old woods were rare.’
Garden Time: The Palm Forest of W.S. Merwin
Robert Becker
‘This place, where the temperature drops noticeably as you walk into it from the road, survived William Stanley Merwin as equal parts oasis, stage set and work of art.’
Yerevan, Armenia
Viken Berberian
‘Ever since the pandemic, our neighborhood is mostly deserted, except for the pigeons and statues.’
Best Book of 1959: Mrs Bridge
Sindya Bhanoo
‘When the book was published, my own parents were children in India, then a newly independent nation.’
The Paternoster: A Requiem
Mark Blacklock
‘To step into a paternoster lift is to step into the circulatory system of a building, to become a part of its very structure.’
Cooking from Memory
Barclay Bram
Barclay Bram reports from Chengdu – on the attention to detail in Sichuanese cooking.
