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Explore Essays and memoir

Two Years in the Dark

Andrew O’Hagan

‘There's no right or wrong about this, there's only style.’

They tell me you are Big

Todd McEwen

‘Airports like abattoirs are white.’

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.’

The Lord in his Wisdom

Jackie Kay

‘I realize with a fresh horror that Jonathan is seeing me as the sin’

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.’

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.’

Now A Major Motion Picture

Todd McEwen

‘None of these high-falutin pansy-ass would-be 'technologies' are going to save literature.’

Lagos Must Prosper

Alexis Okeowo

21 million people, $91 billion GDP, an ambitious governor whose term is up: Alexis Okeowo on the megacity of Lagos

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.’

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. ’

The Collector

Paul Maliszewski

‘Mitchell's writing is a blueprint for a New York which was then disappearing and is now almost lost.’

The Emily Dickinson Series

Janet Malcolm

The Emily Dickinson Series is a collection of collages by Janet Malcolm that appear in Granta 126: do you remember.

My Body

Sarah Manguso

‘When I was twenty-one I became a citizen of the hospital.’

War and Peace on the Big Sandy River

Dean H. King

‘Far from the canyons of lower Manhattan or the rugged peaks of Afghanistan, 9/11 led to an unexpected breakthrough in an ancient feud.’