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Explore Essays and memoir

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?’

War Dogs

Aleksandar Hemon

‘He never bothered the refugees, never barked at those miserable people.’

The Madonna of the Sea

Maaza Mengiste

‘If you can survive, all of this will pass.’

Detroit, 1966

Lynda Schuster

‘This is how it starts, my yearning to escape: with a snot-green triangular stamp from Qatar.’

Holy Solitude

Kong Yalei

‘I always think, either as a reader or as a writer, one person – anyone – can struggle against this filthy world by entering into a world of literature.’

Lessons from a Hustler

Peter Mountford

‘With Buck, pool was clearly an intellectual exercise and he was scarily cool at the table.’

Revolution Revived: Egyptian Diary

Wiam El-Tamami

‘This is what they don’t tell you on the news – about the pockets of normalcy that always exist, persist.’

Our Adder

Richard Kerridge

‘Our zoo needed something more thrilling, more dangerous, we had decided. We wanted an adder.’

The Art of Horror

Michael Salu

‘Often, the most frightening thing is facing the other.’

Prison Echoes

Shahrnush Parsipur

‘When you are free, you inevitably feel compelled to act, but when incarcerated, you are powerless to do so.’

The Meaning of Zombies

Naomi Alderman

‘They’re the interchangeable anonymous people we encounter on our daily commute, those whose humanity we cannot acknowledge.’

Kidnapped

Scott Johnson

‘Sometimes, these sorts of details made their way into wire stories as bullet-pointed footnotes. Other times, the stories screamed into the lives of people I knew.’

Vanishing Virgil

Maaza Mengiste

‘We want to believe that we will die with dignity; that death is a confrontation and the battle is somewhat fair.’

The Plano Suicides

Stefan Merrill Block

‘My parents moved us to Plano for the reasons so many move to Plano: jobs, good schools, a town perfectly engineered to render successful families.’