Explore Essays and memoir
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Wrestling with Translation
Jeffrey Yang
‘As I embarked on my adventure I immediately started to feel that old hatred for simplified Chinese characters.’
The Aesthetics of Resistance
Peter Weiss
‘His whole life, he had declared while still at work on this painting, was nothing less than a continual struggle against the backwardness of thought and the killing of art.’
In Gikuyu, for Gikuyu, of Gikuyu
Binyavanga Wainaina
‘My first name, Binyavanga, has always been a sort of barometer of public mood.’
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.’
Liberation Day
Christa Wolf
‘The world stubbornly refused to end and we were not prepared to cope with a world that refused to end.’
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.’
King’s Girls
Lindsay Watson
‘The effeteness of a small number of King's students was fascinating to me at first, then repellent, and before long completely uninteresting. They dressed in peculiar clothes, talked in silly voices and appeared to me to be living caricatures of the human race. At times I longed for some familiar ordinariness and found it with boys from other colleges who introduced me to football and pool and pubs.’
The Last Eighteen Drops
Vitali Vitaliev
‘Drinking vodka is just a memory for me now. Vodka was hurting me.’
Naples is Closed
Barry Unsworth
‘Naples had always been high on the list of places I wanted to visit‘.
