Explore Essays and memoir
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A Handful of Walnuts
Ahmed Errachidi & Clive Stafford Smith
‘There was no horizon, no life and nothing to see.’
A Hippy Among Communists
Klaus Schlesinger
‘In March 1975, thirty years after the collapse of German fascism, N., a student from Berlin – bearded and long-haired – attended a series of lectures at a university on the Baltic coast.’
A History
William Cooper
‘She was fighting for breath, fighting to live, perhaps fighting not to leave us.’
A Hunger
Fran Lock
‘Both has a way of being neither.’
An essay by Fran Lock from the anthology Queer Life, Queer Love.
A Job on the Line
Desmond Barry
‘The atmosphere in the house was thick with my father's depression.’
A Journey into Afghanistan
Peregrine Hodson
‘We had been travelling for a week, and had reached the territory of the Hesb Nasr: a rival group of mujahedin who were notorious for ambushing travellers, stealing their weapons and skinning their victims.’
A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out
Milan Kundera
‘But since Europe itself is in the process of losing its own cultural identity, it perceives in Central Europe nothing but a political regime; put another way, it sees in Central Europe only Eastern Europe.’
A Language of Figs
Sema Kaygusuz
Sema Kaygusuz on the inheritances of genocide and historical memory, and what her own grandmother, a survivor of the Dersim Massacre in Turkey, taught her about life and language.
A Letter
Sławomir Mrożek
‘I draw your attention to football. The practice of this game threatens the basis of our very way of life.’
A letter from Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro
The letter that accompanied Ishiguro’s first submission to Granta.
A Letter to my Sons: War’s End
Heinrich Böll
‘No, it's not easier for you than it was for us: don't let them tell you otherwise.’