Explore Essays and memoir
Sort by:
Sort by:
Shaking Hands with the Zeitgeist
Wolf Biermann
‘He was, after all, more than a mere hiccup in the history of the world.’
The Table
Pawel Huelle
‘‘Oh, that table!’ my mother would shriek, ‘I just can't stand it a moment longer! Other people have decent furniture.’’
Ohne Mich: Why I Shall Never Return To Germany
Martha Gellhorn
‘Nothing would have brought me back except that I worried about the European Community whose full flowering I will surely not live to see but I invest my faith in it.’
Baghdad Diary
Nuha al-Radi
‘Other countries do wrong: look what Russia did in Afghanistan, or Turkey invading Cyprus, or Israel taking over Palestine and Lebanon. Nobody bombed them senseless. They were not even punished. Perhaps we have too much history.’
Zagreb
Dubravka Ugrešić
‘‘We’ll print your book if you bring us 140 kilos of paper,’ says my friend, a publisher. ‘Where can I find 140 kilos of paper?’ ‘I don’t know. That’s your problem, you’re the writer.’’
Dobrinja
Nedžad lbrišimović
‘The whole idea is that Adem is going to prevent the crimes that have already occurred.’
Starting Out in Chicago
James Atlas
‘Dangling Man was his M.A., Bellow liked to say; The Victim was his Ph.D.‘
When Did You Last See Your Father?
Blake Morrison
‘When did you last see your father? Was it when they burned the coffin? Put the lid on it? When he exhaled his last breath? When he last sat up and said something? When he last recognized me? When he last smiled? When he last did something for himself unaided?‘
A very young Dancer
Todd McEwen
‘I have a snapshot of the two of us: late on a summer afternoon we're playing in an inflatable wading pool.‘
The Names of Women
Louise Erdrich
‘Ikwe is the word for woman in the language of the Anishinabe, my mother's people, whose descendants, mixed with and married to French trappers and farmers, are the Michifs of the Turtle Mountain reservation in North Dakota.‘
The Contents of Pockets
Luc Sante
‘Time in its passing casts off particles of itself in the form of images, documents, relics, junk.‘
Breaking In
Andrew Motion
‘He dedicated The Less Deceived to her: it was the only collection of poems he dedicated to anyone.‘
