Explore Essays and memoir
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Mother’s Death
Stephen Sharp
‘Last year father attacked me as a “wet radish”. This caused me to give up writing diary entries.’
Palmyra
Charles Glass & Don McCullin
‘ISIS’s second conquest of Palmyra astonished everyone, and fed the belief in a Syrian government conspiracy to assist ISIS.’
New Town Blues
Jason Cowley & Gus Palmer
‘They had believed they were coming to a new town. But, they said, Harlow wasn’t new: it looked old.’
Renderings
Edward Burtynsky & Anthony Doerr
‘Often when I stare into the alien circuitry of a Burtynsky picture, it takes me a while to figure out what has actually been photographed.’ Anthony Doerr introduces Edward Burtynsky’s photographs.
The Last Shopkeepers of London
David Flusfeder
‘It became a kind of mission to find contemporaries of theirs that weren’t closing down, establishments that have continued to flourish, or at least endure.’
Root and Branch
Sana Valiulina
‘I am my father’s daughter, a former prisoner of war and “suspicious person” who spent ten years in the Gulag.’ Translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon.
Karl Kraus and Veza
Elias Canetti
‘It was natural that the rumors about both these people should reach me at the same time; they came from the same source, from which everything new for me came at that time.’
The Editor’s Chair: On Svetlana Alexievich
Jacques Testard
‘It is clear when reading Svetlana Alexievich that she has a deep empathy for the characters whose stories she tells.’
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.’
The Leech Barometer
Rebecca Giggs
‘To be consumed by leeches is to be vital, to be animate, though it is also to be reminded you are something else’s prey, and therefore porous and mortal.’
Terminus
Pedro Rosa Mendes
‘We hope that the copilot knows the terrain well. That his mask of youth conceals the face of a seasoned veteran of war. That he knows the minefields because he helped plant them.’
In the Valley of Coachella
Susan Straight
Novelist Susan Straight and photographer Douglas McCulloh on the presidential streets of the ‘real’ Coachella
