Explore Essays and memoir
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Maruti 800
Rana Dasgupta
‘Like a tiny old woman surrounded by strapping grandsons, the Maruti 800 was in fact the progenitor of all that new, muscular, vehicular variety.’
Mona Simpson | First Sentence
Mona Simpson
‘A year later, still in third person, I’d taken five days off my character’s long wait. I’d moved to present tense, though, for more immediacy.’
Be Careful with that Fan
Andre Perry
‘I was stuck in Texas for a month. The days passed like slow-motion films.
Thing with Feathers that Perches in the Soul
Anthony Doerr
‘It has to be love, doesn’t it? In however many of its infinite permutations?’
Living Goddess
Isabella Tree
‘I longed to know what she was thinking, what she did all day when she wasn’t performing rituals.’
My Chess Teacher
Ricardo Lísias
‘The environment, however, wasn’t a hostile one. Though it was filled with the strangest guys in town, they were only there to play.’
A Place on Earth: Scenes from a War
Anjan Sundaram
Dense forest and formless roads lead Anjan Sundaram to the sites of conflict in the Central African Republic in 2014.
Foreigners
Daniel Gascón
‘It would’ve been a magical moment if my neighbours hadn’t started fucking at that very second.’
In the Shadow of the Hospital
Tim Winton
‘All that yearning spilling down amid the treetops and roof ridges, a shadow I’d never properly considered before.’
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.’
The Question of Fate
Catherine Lacey
‘The possibility that I’d unwittingly tapped into her fate and used it as fuel for a story sickened me.’
