Explore Essays and memoir
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Best Book of 1991: Mao II by Don DeLillo
Colin Barrett
‘The ultimate goal of each act of art, each work of terror, is to demolish the old, incumbent reality, and create a new one.’
The Raingod’s Green, Dark as Passion
Kevin Barry
‘If cities are sexed, as Jan Morris believes, then Cork is a male place. Personified further, I would cast him as low-sized, disputatious and stoutly built, a hard-to-knock-over type.’
A Job on the Line
Desmond Barry
‘The atmosphere in the house was thick with my father's depression.’
The End?
John Barth
‘What do you do when your daily routine comes to a halt, when your latest achievement just might be your last?’
Out of the Cradle
John Barth
‘What had formerly been a sedative, a tranquilizing soporific, had morphed into a facilitator of reflection, contemplation, deliberation, even inspiration.’
Uwaa: the sound of the feeling that cannot be spoken
Polly Barton
An excerpt from Fifty Sounds, a memoir by Polly Barton, translator of Aoko Matsuda and Kikuko Tsumura.
Elif Batuman | Is Travel Writing Dead?
Elif Batuman
‘The power imbalance built into travel writing is just a heightened version of an imbalance that’s there in all writing.’
Who Killed Tolstoy?
Elif Batuman
‘I walked along the birch-lined alleys of Yasnaya Polyana, looking for clues. Snakes were swimming in the pond, making a rippling pattern. Everything here was a museum.’
Yangdol’s Journey
Manuel Bauer
‘Every year, more than 2,000 Tibetan refugees arrive in Nepal and India seeking asylum. Almost fifty per cent of them are children.’
What Do Women Want?
Devorah Baum
‘What we’re arguing about turns out to be how to speak to each other at all.’
It Is Decidedly So
Sara Baume
‘There is always a cat sitting on the kitchen windowsill, in the background of every ordinary and extraordinary event, a softly focused silhouette, a pair of piercing eyes.’
Sara Baume responds to twenty-nine photographs from Magnum Photos.
