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Explore Essays and memoir

Telling My Story

Stella Duffy

‘I wonder if they could all smell the queer on me, the queer in me, the burgeoning sexuality that I had no words for at the time.’

Cross-Dressers

Sébastien Lifshitz & Andrew McMillan

‘These images appear to give a glimpse of a ghost-self, a photographic negative of the heart.’ Andrew McMillan introduces photography curated by Sébastien Lifshitz.

Abscessed Tooth

Debra Gwartney

‘Silence allows me to pretend that this happened to someone else a long time ago, and not to me.’

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.

See What You Do to Me

TaraShea Nesbit

‘My intention was to protect myself, and not to have to go back on my word.’

On the Trouble of Bound Association

Lisa Wells

‘We cannot know our era as it’s unfolding.’

Jailbait

Ottessa Moshfegh

‘Part of what made him interesting was that I felt he would dismiss me the moment I bored him.’

What Do Women Want?

Devorah Baum

‘What we’re arguing about turns out to be how to speak to each other at all.’

What Silence Knows

Anthony Shadid

‘Words can’t quite re-create the smell of war. I have found myself trying to wash it out of my hair, off my fingers. More than once, I have run water over the soles of my shoes.’

To Remember Is to Live Again

Buddhadeva Bose & Amit Chaudhuri

‘Never, long as I live, will I forget the few days I had spent with the Millers.’ Buddhadeva Bose on his friendship with Henry Miller.

Notebooks

Amitava Kumar

‘I wanted sex as my subject, not only the innocence but also the bruising.’

Five are the fingers, and five are the sins

Rebecca Watson

Rebecca Watson on the life of the man who prototyped fascism, the Italian writer Gabriele D’Annunzio

The Unpunished Vice

Edmund White

‘Reading is at once a lonely and an intensely sociable act.’

To the Castle and Back

Václav Havel

‘I am announcing that I have returned from the USA. I thank all of those who worked in the domestic resistance. Likewise I thank all of us who worked in the foreign resistance.’