Explore Essays and memoir
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Best Book of 1999: Ai’s Vice
Jillian Weise
‘I love Ai’s work because it gives me permission and reminds me that poetry invented fiction. I needed that in 1999 and I need it today.’
Best Book of 2005: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty
Caoilinn Hughes
Caoilinn Hughes on why Zadie Smith’s On Beauty is the best book of 2005
Best Book of 2009: William Vollmann’s Imperial
Sam Byers
Sam Byers on why William Vollmann’s Imperial is the best book of 2009
Best Book of 2011: Kingdom Animalia
Nell Boeschenstein
‘As the title suggests, this is a book about the family of animals, the family of man, and the family of family.’
Best Book of 2012: Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell, by Katherine Angel
Rebecca Watson
Rebecca Watson on the best book of 2012: Unmastered, by Katherine Angel.
Best Book of 2013: Tom Drury’s Pacific
John Patrick McHugh
‘There is a remarkable flow to the novel, like that aimless but essential drunken chatter after your third pint.’ John Patrick McHugh on why Tom Drury’s Pacific is the best book of 2013.
Bohemian Rhapsody in Five Acts
Tiffany Murray
Tiffany Murray on living with Freddie Mercury as a child.
Breasts: A History
Krys Malcolm Belc
‘My breasts are shrinking. As my fat redistributes it settles in my belly and leaves my chest.’
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.’
Carys Davies | Notes on Craft
Carys Davies
‘All good stories are both resonant and concrete; they live in the mind of the reader and reverberate beyond the pages of the book.’
Chameleon
Tomoko Sawada & Sayaka Murata
‘If Sawada can transform herself without limit, maybe I can too.’ Sayaka Murata introduces Tomoko Sawada’s photographs, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
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.
