Explore Essays and memoir
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Where Does Writing Come From?
Richard Ford
‘Occasionally if pushed or annoyed I'll come right out and say it: I make these little buggers up, that's what. So sue me’.
News Shark
Robert Drewe
‘By the time I was nineteen I was in a spin: hyperactive with selfconsciousness, excitement, sadness and suddenly assumed–and ill-fitting–maturity’.
Coming to America
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
‘As a child in Germany I knew next to nothing about America.’ From 1998, Hans Magnus Enzensberger on the German view of America.
Then and Now
Daniel Meadows
’Daniel Meadows has traced many of the people he photographed then, but this is of little interest to us‘.
Uncle Ed
Keith Fleming
‘Back in 1976 when I was sixteen, my uncle, the novelist Edmund White, rescued me from the messy aftermath of my parents' divorce and brought me to live with him in New York’.
The Furnace
Lydia Davis
‘My father has trouble with his hearing and does not like to talk on the phone, so I talk on the phone mainly to my mother’.
Closer
David Malouf
‘There was a time, not so long ago, when we saw my Uncle Charles twice each year, at Easter and Christmas’.
Asking for it
James Hamilton-Paterson
‘Having my hair cut one morning in February 1999, I fell foul of one of those barber-shop discussions which are a feature of life here in Italy’.
Martha Gellhorn
Nicholas Shakespeare
‘What clipped the wings of her fiction and grounded her imagination was precisely what made her soar as a journalist.’
