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Explore Essays and memoir

Boys, Barricades, Beaches

Jack Parlett

On the queer history of New York’s Fire Island.

Haunted Houses

Laura Maw

‘Ghost stories, then, are not always characterised by fear. Sometimes, they are stories of belief, comfort, faith.’

Laura Maw on the photography of Corinne May Botz.

How To Milk

Emily Ogden

‘The milking technology for cows is in many ways superior to the one for humans.’

An essay from Emily Ogden’s On Not Knowing.

Black and Female

Tsitsi Dangarembga

‘By the time I was in my teens, I had taken up an existence framed by a double negative: not male, not white.’

An excerpt from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s essay collection, Black and Female.

Words in the Head and Words in the Sentence

Herta Müller

‘During an interrogation speech glows hot in the mouth, and what is spoken freezes.’

Herta Müller on language. Translated from the German by Philip Boehm.

Introduction

Sigrid Rausing

‘Our theme of conflict is internal as well as external.’

The editor introduces the issue.

Letters from Ukraine

Lindsey Hilsum

‘As every soldier and every journalist who has ever covered a war knows – sleeping and eating are the most important things.’

Lindsey Hilsum writes home from Ukraine.

The Recipe

Rebecca May Johnson

‘The recipe is a text that can produce spattering because it was spattering before it was language.’

Rebecca May Johnson on recipes, repetition and intimacy.

Skromnost

Janet Malcolm

‘The Czech word skromnost means “modesty”, but it also carries a mild sense of forelock-tugging humbleness, of knowing one’s place.’

An excerpt from Janet Malcolm’s final book.

Talk America

George Prochnik

An excerpt from George Prochnik’s forthcoming memoir.

The Moving Target of Being

Suzanne Scanlon

‘When I was in the hospital, the belief in “recovered memories” was at its peak.’

Suzanne Scanlon on the shifting parameters of illness.

A Place that Belongs to Us

Daniel Trilling

‘The notes belong to you, said the guards, but the paper you wrote them on is ours.’

Fragmentary non-fiction by Daniel Trilling.

Fateha

Sana Valiulina

‘While Fateha is fleeing westward with her children, another woman is trying to save herself from the city on the shore of the Sea of Azov.’

Memoir by Sana Valiulina, translated by Polly Gannon.

Signs of an Approaching War

Volodymyr Rafeyenko

‘We were ourselves migrating birds; in a sense, refugees, displaced persons, without a home or a home town.’

Volodymyr Rafeyenko on the war on Ukraine, translated by Sasha Dugdale.