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Explore Essays and memoir

Be Careful with that Fan

Andre Perry

‘I was stuck in Texas for a month. The days passed like slow-motion films.

The Ambivalent

Paulo Scott

‘He not only sees the World Cup as a ceasefire, but also as a series of sleights of hand that hide what’s really going on, political debauchery, spin and chicanery.’

Three Football Books

Clara Becker, Stuart Evers & Jethro Soutar

‘Football is a game; it’s not real life. But in a continent as illogical as Latin America, the lines blur.’

Sasayama

Nadifa Mohamed

‘It was in one of those listless summers after graduation that I found myself in the small Japanese town of Sasayama.’

Ventimiglia

Joanna Walsh

‘Love is constant revolution, pure disruption, it can never be stilled.’

Three Japanese Books

Samantha Harvey, Phil Klay & Tao Lin

‘Each word is a snowflake falling, and with each paragraph the snow settles deeper.’

Toh EnJoe | First Sentence

Toh EnJoe

‘I think that the thing called thought can be viewed as rooted in the very real phenomenon of neurons firing.’

The Casualties

Katie Kitamura

‘The following are some of the Japanese players who also appeared in the major leagues during the Age of Ichiro.’

The Power of a Grandmother Named Tranquilina

Valerie Miles

'Never underestimate the power of a grandmother to leave her mark on coming generations, or the taste of her cooking to cause an epiphany big enough to give the world a shiver.'

Linked

Ruth Ozeki

‘old poems, like polished stones, / tumbled words to break my teeth on.’

Blue Moon

Hiromi Kawakami

‘Rather than death itself, it is the disappearance of traces that seems unbearable and sad. The disappearance of all signs that I existed.’

The Beauty of the Package

Pico Iyer

‘You can throw yourself into any fantasy, she (and her country) might have been saying, so long as you don’t mistake it for real life.’

Printable

Toh EnJoe

‘Which is scarier: that the past could actually change or that you could just think it did?’

Scavengers

Adam Johnson

‘I was dying to buy something, anything that would help my wife and children understand the profound surrealism and warped reality I’d experienced on my research trip to North Korea.’