Explore Essays and memoir
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One Ridge Over
Josh Weil
‘Some mornings I see him coming up through the mist. The grey shape of a long-haired man carrying a long-barreled gun amid the bare grey branches of the old apple trees.’
A question of identity
Dubravka Ugrešić
‘One of the first things a child learns is the sentiment: My country is… And so begins the homeland briefing that lasts from the cradle to the grave.’
Keeping it in the family
Claire Vaye Watkins
‘My father first came to Death Valley because Charles Manson told him to.’
My First European
Edmund White
‘I belong to the last generation of Americans obsessed with Europe and intimidated by it.’
In Gikuyu, for Gikuyu, of Gikuyu
Binyavanga Wainaina
‘My first name, Binyavanga, has always been a sort of barometer of public mood.’
Simon Willis | What I’m Reading
Simon Willis
‘Like an excitable child, I rushed to the foyer to buy my copy.’
We Went to Saigon
Tia Wallman
‘I thought that this must be the sort of plane that crashes. What were a few more dead, travelling to the city of the dead?’
The Merry Widow
Edmund White
’She met my father in Texas and then they moved north, where I was born in Cincinnati.‘
King’s Girls
Lindsay Watson
‘The effeteness of a small number of King's students was fascinating to me at first, then repellent, and before long completely uninteresting. They dressed in peculiar clothes, talked in silly voices and appeared to me to be living caricatures of the human race. At times I longed for some familiar ordinariness and found it with boys from other colleges who introduced me to football and pool and pubs.’
Seminarians
Marcos Villatoro
‘The seminary building, parked smack in the middle of the campus, looked west to Davis Hall (women), south to another women's dorm building, and east to the vocationless, unharnessed men of Beast Hall. What did they expect, with so many earthly reminders of flesh around us? Out of the fourteen young men who discerned the call, few, very few, made it to ordination.’
