Explore Essays and memoir
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My Father’s Life
Leonard Michaels
‘Six days a week he rose early, dressed, ate breakfast alone, put on his hat, and walked to his barbershop at 207 Henry Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, about half a mile from our apartment.’
The Writing of ‘Or Shall We Die?’
Ian McEwan
‘There was too the challenge, as I saw it, of writing a singable English, simple and clear, that could express public themes without pomposity and private feelings without bathos.’
An Escape from Kampala
Wycliffe Kato
‘‘Be brave,’ she said, ‘pull yourself together. What you are about to see is worse than you ever imagined.’ She asked if I knew what Winston Churchill had called Uganda. He had called it the pearl of Africa.’
Watching the Rain in Galicia
Gabriel García Márquez
‘Only then did I understand where my grandmother had got that credulity which allowed her to live in a supernatural world in which everything was possible and where rational explanations were totally lacking in validity.’
Maud Newton | Portrait of My Father
Maud Newton
‘Exactly how long the prostitute, unbeknownst to my father, stayed at our house and slept in my bed is hard to gauge.’
The Conflicted Legacy of Meles Zenawi
Maaza Mengiste
‘Meles Zenawi’s legacy is as complicated as the life he chose to live, under a name (Meles) that he took from a fallen comrade during his days as a guerrilla fighter. ’
Essex
Norman Lewis
‘Essex is the ugliest county. I only went there to be able to work in peace and quiet and get away from the settlers from London south of the river.’
Now A Major Motion Picture
Todd McEwen
‘None of these high-falutin pansy-ass would-be 'technologies' are going to save literature.’
My Chess Teacher
Ricardo Lísias
‘The environment, however, wasn’t a hostile one. Though it was filled with the strangest guys in town, they were only there to play.’
Paris or Prague?
Milan Kundera
‘May in Paris was an explosion of revolutionary lyricism. The Prague Spring was the explosion of post-revolutionary scepticism.’
