Explore Essays and memoir
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Loved Ones: Introduction
Ian Jack
One of the world's unfair divisions is that between the writer and the written-about, and this is nowhere more true than in the literary form called the memoir.
A letter from Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro
The letter that accompanied Ishiguro’s first submission to Granta.
Stacks
Ted Hodgkinson
‘There are few things worse than being rebuked by the very books you have promised yourself you will read.’
Betrayal
Adam Foulds
‘The thrill of this film – and it is thrilling – is seeing that understood and played out by actors of incredible skill.’
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.’
Fragments of a Lament for Thelonious Monk
Russell Hoban
‘Always the slant rhyme with Thelonious, that was his Thelonious assault on the grey and civil devils of the ordinary. Walk tall and slanty, Thelonious; you live.’
The Thirties
Martha Gellhorn
Martha Gellhorn on Paris in the thirties, cadging bed and breakfast off H.G. Wells and living in the White House with the Roosevelts.
Pilgrim
Patricia Hampl
‘Real travel wants to be dangerous, wants to smoke out the truth of the Other—providing of course you get out alive.’
An Open Letter to Mbeki
Petina Gappah
‘You are human, Mr Mbeki, and are therefore prey to the resentments and obstinacies that plague the mere mortal.’
Hajiriya and Gajiriya | Moving Parts
Ruchir Joshi
‘The day after my visit to the silica factories in Godhra, I am taken to meet three dead men.’
You Want Gunfire With That?
Dan Hind
‘The end of Soviet communism was supposed to have brought with it the end of ideological struggle and even, according to a significant few, history itself.’
