Explore essays and memoir
Broken Animals
Britta Jaschinski
‘These bored, frustrated and hungry animals appear as reluctant figures in some unsolvable puzzle, or as victims of a grand experiment whose original purpose is lost in time.’
Slaughterhouse
Arnon Grunberg
‘I wonder whether there’s a real moral difference between killing an animal and killing a human being.’ Translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett.
On Coyotes
Diane Cook
‘There is something about the presence of coyotes that makes any place feel wilder than it is.’
A Moveable Beast
Helge Skodvin & Ned Beauman
‘Taxidermy offers animals both a second life and a second harassment by the Anthropocene.’ Ned Beauman introduces the photography of Helge Skodvin.
Tyger, Tyger
Aman Sethi
‘A man-eating tiger was on the prowl when I arrived in Pilibhit one rainy evening in September.’
Dog
Nadeem Aslam
‘More than once the new dog was aggressive, a stab of fire, but I did not tell the grown-ups. I feared they would take him away.’
Winterkill
Cal Flyn
‘Wildlife foundations find themselves calling for the deaths of tens of thousands of wild animals.’
Swifts
Adam Foulds
‘Swifts come closer than any other creature to living in the sky and having air and ceaseless movement as their home.’
Animal Studies
Elliot Ross & Alexander MacLeod
‘The title of this series of photographs is Animal Studies, but I am not sure about that second word. A noun or a verb? A thing or an action? Are these studies of animals or are these animals studying?’ Alexander MacLeod introduces the photography of Elliot Ross.
The Farmer’s Son
John Connell
‘I’m twenty-nine and I’ve never delivered a calf myself. But that’s all about to change’
The Falconer and the Hawks
Ben Crane
‘A fine balance of precision and coiled unsparing instinct, all contained within a gossamer skein of feather, skin, muscle and bone.’
Magpie
Esther Woolfson
‘His life was one of calculation and endeavour, of learning and watching, remembering and trying.’
Loggerheads
Rebecca Giggs
‘What idiom or instrument captures how the weather is felt by the animals, in their bodies, their nests and niches?’
Large Black Rooster
Daniyal Mueenuddin
‘Early one morning in the month of June, someone ran over a huge black rooster on County Road W in Wisconsin hill country.’
The Bible As Literature, Literature As Scripture
Stuart Kelly
'Literature and literary criticism took me away from the Church as a teenager, and literature and literary criticism brought me back to it later.'
Jeremy Gavron | Notes on Craft
Jeremy Gavron
‘Is the conventional novel the closest model we have to our condition? Or simply the bedtime story that most comforts us?’
Above the Tree Line
Teva Harrison
Teva Harrison visits and illustrates the Northwest Passage through the Canadian arctic for Granta 141: Canada
Typing Practice
Barbara Ehrenreich
‘I didn’t start my journal with the idea of recording my progress toward the ultimate truth.’
Abuse, Silence, and the Light That Virginia Woolf Switched On
April Ayers Lawson
When Virginia Woolf was thirteen, she was abused by her half-brother George Duckworth. No one believed her - not even her biographers. April Ayers Lawson on Woolf's abuse, and her own.
Clean
Matt Young
An excerpt from Matt Young's memoir Eat The Apple, which explores his three deployments to Iraq as a member of the US Marine Corps.
T.S. Eliot was a terrible hip-hop artist | Discoveries
Eleanor Chandler & Josie Mitchell
The poetry world is abuzz this week in the wake of a controversial essay published in PN Review by British poet Rebecca Watts, denigrating a new generation of ‘amateur’ poets.
The Trickster Creates the World
Eden Robinson
'A Q&A session exploring the writing process with novelist Eden Robinson, her muse Marvin and myself, Fictional Eden Robinson'
Kent Will Tear Us Apart
Neil Belton
All the Devils Are Here was cursed with the status of a cult classic. It’s a book that people who’ve read it, especially writers, can never forget.
Han Suyin: A Friendship
Aamer Hussein
'Han Suyin, elegant postcolonial diva avant la lettre, icon of the new, nonaligned Asia, thorn in the side of the dying British Empire and the American Right.'
Webs of Fiction
Emma Glass
‘The complexity of stories is not singularly reliant on an abundance of words.’
All the Devils Are Here
David Seabrook
‘A seaside shelter in the middle of autumn – it seems a strange choice.’
Equal Recognition | Discoveries
Josie Mitchell
In an article for the LA Review of Books, Deborah Smith discusses the politics of literary translation and the backlash she received after winning the Man Booker International Prize.
Faltering Song
Danny Denton
‘Didn’t we remember lyrics fine before we had the internet in our pockets?’ Danny Denton on the lost art of sing-songing.
Best Book of 1996: The Lost Lunar Baedeker
Natalie Eilbert
‘Mina Loy has been a preferred voice in my head, echoing with a signature delirious chant as a kind of primordial poetry mother.’
