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Explore Essays and memoir

The View from this End

Alexandra Fuller

‘It lay like a sodden comma, curled up against its mother, and no one realised it was dead.’

Lost Cat

Mary Gaitskill

‘Which deaths are tragic and which are not? Who decides what is big and what is little?’

Exhale

Beth Gardiner

‘After all my travels, I can see now what I couldn’t when I started. In the suffering pollution brings, there is also the glimmer of a different future, its outlines visible through the haze.’

The Poem in the Pocket

Héctor Abad Faciolince

‘The note stated that it was by Borges, and I believed that, or at least I wanted to believe it.’

Martin Goodman | Notes on Craft

Martin Goodman

Martin Goodman on why it took him twenty years to write his latest novel, J SS Bach.

How I Became an SJW

Anouchka Grose

‘I had become a pacifist in the time it took to run between the bedroom and the bathroom of a London flat.’

Best Book of 1921: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Will Harris

‘I wanted to understand the world and why it hurt, and soon I stumbled on the Tractatus’ Will Harris on the best book of 1921.

Best Book of 1934: Bruno Schulz’s Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy cynamonowe)  

David Hayden

David Hayden on why Bruno Schulz’s Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy cynamonowe) is the best book of 1934.

Best Book of 2005: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty

Caoilinn Hughes

Caoilinn Hughes on why Zadie Smith’s On Beauty is the best book of 2005

Sobre Cardi B

Rita Indiana

‘Es un himno crudo y catchy escrito por una mujer que ha confesado que escribe sobre lo que le gusta y que lo que le gusta es “fighting bitches”.’

On Cardi B

Rita Indiana

‘A crude, catchy hymn written by a woman who’s confessed to writing about what she likes, and that what she likes is “fighting bitches”.’

A New Front Line

Lindsey Hilsum

Lindsey Hilsum shows how investigative reporting has become just as dangerous as frontline correspondence. ‘Investigative reporters are in more peril than ever and the front line has come to Europe.’

Terminology

Callie Gardner

‘In Iris, they speak a language with a hundred pronouns.’

Ali Fitzgerald | Notes on Craft

Ali Fitzgerald

Notes on crafting a graphic memoir from Ali Fitzgerald.