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Explore Essays and memoir

One Ridge Over

Josh Weil

‘Some mornings I see him coming up through the mist. The grey shape of a long-haired man carrying a long-barreled gun amid the bare grey branches of the old apple trees.’

Pariah

Viramma

‘All my children have been buried where they died’

Persian Love

Alan Warner

‘It is 6:22 of what beauty and life's joy there is to extract’

Petty Thief

A Yi

‘Stop what you’re doing, I’ve caught the guy! He says he knows kung fu.’

Radicalisation in the Digital Age

Marc Weitzmann

Marc Weitzmann on how radicalisation happens in the digital age.

Root and Branch

Sana Valiulina

‘I am my father’s daughter, a former prisoner of war and “suspicious person” who spent ten years in the Gulag.’ Translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon.

Saigon Dreaming

Tela Zasloff

‘In the summer of 1964, when we arrived in Saigon, our house belonged to the United States military, whose cheerful Vietnamese employees moved us in.’

Sara Wheeler | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Sara Wheeler

‘Mass travel has liberated the form. No amount of package tours will stop ordinary life quietly continuing everywhere on earth.’

Searching for Pavese

Alejandro Zambra

‘Something’s gone awry with this article. My intention was to remember, in his birthplace, a writer I admire, and it’s clear that my admiration has waned.’

Self-Consciousness: Memoirs by John Updike

Edmund White

‘The freedom conferred by masks. Children and current wives cannot blame you for what your characters do and say.’

Seminarians

Marcos Villatoro

‘The seminary building, parked smack in the middle of the campus, looked west to Davis Hall (women), south to another women's dorm building, and east to the vocationless, unharnessed men of Beast Hall. What did they expect, with so many earthly reminders of flesh around us? Out of the fourteen young men who discerned the call, few, very few, made it to ordination.’

Shrinks

Edmund White

‘Self-doubt, which is a cousin to self-hatred, became my constant companion.’

Simon Willis | What I’m Reading

Simon Willis

‘Like an excitable child, I rushed to the foyer to buy my copy.’

Since Everything Was Suddening Into A Hurricane

Binyavanga Wainaina

After a sudden stroke, Binyavanga Wainaina and his lover travel to Nairobi to reconcile with his father.