Explore Essays and memoir
Sort by:
Sort by:
She Used to Sing Opera
Imogen Crimp
‘I used to be ashamed of it, though I’m not sure what exactly felt shameful.’
On training to be an opera singer.
Best Book of 1982: A Boy’s Own Story
O Thiam Chin
‘It didn’t occur to me that reading and being a reader was two very distinct things, one an act and a skill, and the other a role and a persona’
O Thiam Chin’s best book of 1982.
Introduction: On Staying at Home
William Atkins
‘If the following pieces can be said to have an overriding characteristic, it is that they take seriously the experience of being a stranger.’
Guest editor William Atkins introduces the issue.
On Mistaking Whales
Bathsheba Demuth
‘The people who lived here lived in the heads of whales.’
A historian from New England goes to the Bering Strait.
Graffiti Mobili
Jennifer Croft
‘The picture of a postcard is a geograft, a scion of a place thrust into the life of a resident of somewhere else.’
Jennifer Croft on graffiti and the history of the postcard.
Primitive Child
Jason Allen-Paisant
‘My roots seemed to be in the ocean; the ocean being symbolic of my absent father.’
Memoir by Jason Allen-Paisant.
From the Center of the World to the End of the World
Eliane Brum
‘For tourists to have this “experience”, six scientists were obliged to interrupt their research and wait until that afternoon, when the weather turned and time in the field shrank.’
Translated from the Portuguese by Diane Grosklaus Whitty.
Notes on Craft
Lucie Elven
‘I make a list of accidents – sentences I’ve misread with my misreading left in them.’
Larger than an Orange
Lucy Burns
An excerpt from Larger than an Orange, a book by Lucy Burns about abortion.
