Explore Essays and memoir
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Field Burning
William Wharton
‘I thought after what had happened to us in the past twenty-four hours I’d never be scared to die again, but I am.’
Waterway
Geoffrey Wolff
‘You would not guess looking into my son's bedroom at home that Blackwing’s ice box would have been scrubbed, but it had been scrubbed.’
Saigon Dreaming
Tela Zasloff
‘In the summer of 1964, when we arrived in Saigon, our house belonged to the United States military, whose cheerful Vietnamese employees moved us in.’
Fortune
Tobias Wolff
‘We’d left Sarasota in the dead of summer, right after my tenth birthday, and headed west under low flickering skies that turned black and exploded and cleared just long enough to leave the air gauzy with steam.’
Cricket in Samoa
Gavin Young
‘Balls flew towards the beach or into dense jungle. Enthusiastic young fielders tumbled head over heels in the morning glories. Village elders, large, heavy-breasted, critical men, lay in the shade on cushions discussing the course of play like contented sea lions on their favourite rocks.’
Getting The Words Out
John Updike
‘No, it is not confrontation but some wish to avoid it, some hasty wish to please, that betrays my flow of speech.’
Italo Calvino
John Updike
‘Post-modernism, if it can be said to exist at all, had in Calvino its most seductive showman.’
Notes from New York
James Wolcott
‘Now and then it can appear that an entire magazine is opening up the silks, searching for a soft place to land.’
Notes from Italy
William Weaver
‘It was easy to meet people, especially if you were a wide-eyed American and spoke Italian. The literary world was particularly accessible, for all the intellectuals wanted to know about the States.’
