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Explore Essays and memoir

The Trickster Creates the World

Eden Robinson

'A Q&A session exploring the writing process with novelist Eden Robinson, her muse Marvin and myself, Fictional Eden Robinson'

Notes on Craft

Paul Dalla Rosa

‘I feel like I’m haunting an empty building, inert, waiting for each room to burst into flames.’

Best Book of 1935: Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi

Naben Ruthnum

Naben Ruthnum on the best book of 1935: Junichiro Tanizaki's The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi.

Exquisite Corpse

Frances Stonor Saunders

‘Europe awoke to a freezing post-war dawn. The winter of 1947 was the worst ever recorded.’

Best Book of 1966: Season of Migration to the North

Ayşegül Savaş

‘Of course, literature cannot be separated from its flesh of language and form. Nor can its tangible subject explain why it moves its reader, through the subtleties of language, or the shadowy geographies that it leaves to the imagination.’

The Best Book of 1943: Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles

Kathryn Scanlan

Kathryn Scanlan on the best book of 1943: Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles.

Kathryn Scanlan | Notes on Craft

Kathryn Scanlan

‘I try to write a sentence as unbudging and fully itself as some object sitting on a shelf in my office.’

A Prize

Christine Schutt

‘He picked our little sister’s laces loose and made her cry.’

All the Devils Are Here

David Seabrook

‘A seaside shelter in the middle of autumn – it seems a strange choice.’

Tyger, Tyger

Aman Sethi

‘A man-eating tiger was on the prowl when I arrived in Pilibhit one rainy evening in September.’

What Silence Knows

Anthony Shadid

‘Words can’t quite re-create the smell of war. I have found myself trying to wash it out of my hair, off my fingers. More than once, I have run water over the soles of my shoes.’

Mother’s Death

Stephen Sharp

‘Last year father attacked me as a “wet radish”. This caused me to give up writing diary entries.’

In the Valley of Coachella

Susan Straight

Novelist Susan Straight and photographer Douglas McCulloh on the presidential streets of the ‘real’ Coachella

The Editor’s Chair: On Svetlana Alexievich

Jacques Testard

‘It is clear when reading Svetlana Alexievich that she has a deep empathy for the characters whose stories she tells.’