Explore Essays and memoir
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The Beauty of the Package
Pico Iyer
‘You can throw yourself into any fantasy, she (and her country) might have been saying, so long as you don’t mistake it for real life.’
Printable
Toh EnJoe
‘Which is scarier: that the past could actually change or that you could just think it did?’
Scavengers
Adam Johnson
‘I was dying to buy something, anything that would help my wife and children understand the profound surrealism and warped reality I’d experienced on my research trip to North Korea.’
Arrival Gates
Rebecca Solnit
‘It was like trying to go back to before the earthquake, to before knowledge.’
Maruti 800
Rana Dasgupta
‘Like a tiny old woman surrounded by strapping grandsons, the Maruti 800 was in fact the progenitor of all that new, muscular, vehicular variety.’
Heart and Soul in Every Stitch
Tash Aw
‘Where wealth and technology go, culture quickly follows, and soon it became acceptable, even desirable, to express an interest in Japan beyond the mere practicality offered by its products.’
Teenage Wastelands
Jim Ruland
‘It took me seven years of marriage to figure out that my wife is a hardcore Pearl Jam fan.’
The Defeated
Jonny Steinberg
‘Peter Mitchell died on a frontier, not so much between black and white, or between the landed and the landless, as between the past and the future.’
The Magic Box
Olivia Laing
‘It never gets dark in Times Square. Sometimes I’d wake at two or three or four and watch waves of neon pass through my room.’ An essay on David Wojnarowicz's work, life and archives.
Nudity
Norman Rush
‘I nursed a precocious rage at the stratagems society was employing to keep me from seeing naked women.’
