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Explore Essays and memoir

The Bees

Dorothea Lasky

‘What is the swarm of bees that enters a poem when language is created?’

Love After Abuse

Lucia Osborne-Crowley

Lucia Osborne-Crowley on the complexity of navigating sexuality while recovering from sexual abuse.

Nina Leger | Notes on Craft

Nina Leger

‘To say nothing about her was the only way to allow her to be everything.’

Bookshelves: John Berger in My Family Album

Amitava Kumar

‘The contours of the family arranged on the bookshelf shifted.’

Karen Olsson | Notes on Craft

Karen Olsson

Karen Olsson shares her notes on the craft of writing: ‘Every book is an unsolvable problem, and yet every time I convince myself I’m just on the verge of cracking it.’

Stuck in Trees (with Apologies to Ian Frazier)

Jessica Francis Kane

‘On 8 January 2018, I noticed a large bunch of purple balloons in a tree near my apartment building.’

Boxing

Fatima Farheen Mirza

Fatima Farheen Mirza on navigating gender roles in a Muslim family, wearing hijab and learning how to box.

The Ungrateful Refugee

Dina Nayeri

‘I was born in 1979, a year of revolution, and grew up in wartime.’ Dina Nayeri on growing up in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

To Zinder

Sven Lindqvist

Obsessed with a single line from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness – Kurtz’s injunction to ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ – Sven Lindqvist set out across Central Africa, and wrote a book that revealed precisely what Europe’s imperial powers had exacted on Africa’s people over the course of the preceding two centuries.

Tadpoles

Primo Levi

‘It was a harsh and brutal puberty: the tiny creatures began to fret, as if an inner sense had forewarned them of the torment in store’

The Snow in Ghana

Ryszard Kapuściński

‘We always carry it to foreign countries, all over the world, our pride and our powerlessness.’ Translated from the Polish by William Brand.

Dreams for Hire

Gabriel García Márquez

‘The wave had erupted with such force that it obliterated the glass lobby.‘ Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor.

Kiltykins

Ved Mehta

‘When I was seeing Kilty (how, even today, the word 'seeing' mesmerizes me), the fact of my blindness was never mentioned, referred to, or alluded to’.

A Great Lake

Nam Le

‘The system wants us to want to belong, at almost any price.’