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Explore Essays and memoir

Brother

Vanessa Onwuemezi

‘Brother, to be your sister is to confront the possibility of having been other than I am.’

Vanessa Onwuemezi on the meaning of sisterhood.

The Stripping of Threads

Jamal Mahjoub

‘I hold no illusions about us being reunited. All of this has gone on for far too long.’

Jamal Mahjoub on family obligation and estrangement.

These Stolen Twins

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

‘In our household there was no distinction of feeling between those who were biologically related and those who were simply instructed to regard each other as such.’

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow on growing up with foster siblings.

Captions

Andrew Miller

‘I note that my brother – he’ll deny it but he was always the moody one – has apparently refused to take Granny’s hand.’

Andrew Miller reflects on three family photographs.

Haunted Houses

Laura Maw

‘Ghost stories, then, are not always characterised by fear. Sometimes, they are stories of belief, comfort, faith.’

Laura Maw on the photography of Corinne May Botz.

How To Milk

Emily Ogden

‘The milking technology for cows is in many ways superior to the one for humans.’

An essay from Emily Ogden’s On Not Knowing.

Words in the Head and Words in the Sentence

Herta Müller

‘During an interrogation speech glows hot in the mouth, and what is spoken freezes.’

Herta Müller on language. Translated from the German by Philip Boehm.

Skromnost

Janet Malcolm

‘The Czech word skromnost means “modesty”, but it also carries a mild sense of forelock-tugging humbleness, of knowing one’s place.’

An excerpt from Janet Malcolm’s final book.

A Wolf in the Forest Wants

Sarah Moss

‘I biked to the hospital anyway, because it didn’t occur to me to think of an alternative form of transport.’

Sarah Moss on her admission to hospital.

Epicrisis

Kirill Kobrin

Kirill Kobrin on living through war and the conflict in Ukraine. Translated from the Russian by Veronika Zitta.

Literary Exhibitionism

Nataliya Meshchaninova

‘In my diary I was always sassy, proud, and forbidding.’

Beirut Fragments, 2021

Charif Majdalani

‘We live with the permanent sense of imminent disaster.’

Charif Majdalani on the situation in Beirut. Translated from the French by Ruth Diver.

The Steepest Places: In the Cordillera Central

Ben Mauk

‘In the mountains, however, Duterte seemed to have met his match.’

Ben Mauk meets the mountains of Luzon.

The Dam

Taran N. Khan

‘Invisible borders are not the same as open borders.’

Taran N. Khan on Hamburg’s Steindamm.