Explore Essays and memoir
Sort by:
Sort by:
The Fascist Within
Vesna Maric
‘Yugoslavia’s ending, in bloodshed, cannot be its only legacy, the only lesson we take away from its existence.’
The Doe
Daisy Lafarge
‘Never uncomplicated, affection between species is the cup of temperance whose waters run in both directions.’
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See
A. Kendra Greene
‘The Icelandic Phallological Museum is smaller than you’d think. The domestic collection of 212 specimens fits in one room.’
This Compost: Erotics of Rot
Elvia Wilk
‘Mushrooms sprout from the bathtub grout; disintegrating apples overflow from the trash can. Insects circle. The decomposition is lively and sensorially overwhelming.’
Mother-Wit
Jeffery Renard Allen
‘It would be many years before I understood that around my mother’s sober acceptance of the status quo was a whole culture she had developed for our subsistence and well-being.’
Seeing Things
Emily LaBarge
‘The City of the city is jagged and spiky, tangled, twisted – burned down, paved over, rebuilt, unruly with wealth and poverty side by side, as they have always been.’
Feeling Bullish: On My Great-Uncle, Gay Matador and Friend of Hemingway
Rafael Frumkin
‘In his suit, with his pigtail and his montera, he was pure potential: he could be masculine vanquisher or gold-embroidered fairy. He was both, actually, at all times, and nobody who came to see him fight thought any less of him for it.’
The Poetry Vaccine
Peter Pomerantsev
‘The quarantine and the closure of borders was giving my father Cold War flashbacks. And while Covid-19 was reducing life and death to statistics, father was using literature to affirm individuality.’
Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness?
Kevin Brazil
‘You never can wholly control the things you cling to. But you can figure out what has made you the surface you are.’
An Education
Ariel Saramandi
‘Once, early on, before he learned such things were never said, my brother approached a white boy in his class with my mother’s maiden name and said they must be cousins. The violence in my family’s home started a year or so later.’
The Flowers Look More Beautiful Now Than Ever
Mieko Kawakami
‘It’s hard to imagine a country where a lockdown would function perfectly, but in the case of Japan, which lacks basic individualism, the current situation has bred insidious hatred and division.’
