Explore Essays and memoir
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A Poet in Cuba
Reinaldo Arenas
‘Perfect totalitarian systems have always been in the vanguard: they modify not only the past and the future, but they also abolish the present.’
A Rationalist in the Jungle
Héctor Abad
‘A pale-faced, near-sighted urbanite like me is nothing less than handicapped in the heart of the jungle.’
A Small Bengal, NW3
Amit Chaudhuri
‘Those who stayed on had their reasons. . . and none of those reasons, it is safe to suppose, had anything to do with an overwhelming attachment to England.’
An essay by Amit Chaudhuri.
A Story for Aesop
John Berger
‘The image impressed me when I set eyes upon it for the first time. It was as if it were already familiar, as if, as a child, I had already seen the same man framed in a doorway.’
A Summer of Japanese Literature
Dan Bradley
From manga to crime fiction, contemporary literature to Nobel-Prize-winning classics, here are ten works of Japanese literature worth spending your summer on
A True Afrikaner
Mary Benson
‘What first struck me was his courtesy: it never faltered even when some remark by the prosecutor or an action by the police angered him, hardening the expression in his blue eyes.’
A Vacation From Myself
John Beckman
‘My every next thought took a melancholy detour through drippy forests of humid emotions, often never to return’
Abbottabad Pastoral
Humera Afridi
‘Until now, I had never experienced a disaster, or witnessed mass suffering and death close up.’
According to Your Will
Naomi Alderman
‘Thank you, God,’ said the boys, ‘for not making me a woman.’ ‘Thank you, God,’ said the girls, ‘for making me according to Your will.’
Africa’s Future Has No Space for Stupid Black Men
Pwaangulongii Dauod
‘The night was full of energy. The kind of energy that Africa needs to reinvent itself.’