Explore Essays and memoir
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Barely Imagined Beings
Caspar Henderson
‘Monsters of one kind or another are woven into virtually all the cultures of which we have record.’
Not Easy to Tell
Patrick Ryan
‘I told him he looked like an assassin in an Elmore Leonard novel, and he smiled.’
José Saramago: a celebration
Margaret Jull Costa
‘It is hard to think of a more imaginative novelist, one whose books are so full of humour and humanity and invention.’
False Blood
Will Self
‘The only real universals are that we all live – and, of course, we all must die.’
Your Birthday Has Come and Gone
Paul Auster
‘For the first time in all the years you had known her, she sounded deranged.’
The Mission
Tom Bamforth
‘It is strange, the rituals we find ourselves carrying out before the unknown.’
Deng’s Dogs
Santiago Roncagliolo
‘My earliest memory of Peru is a newspaper photograph from 1980 of dead dogs hanging from lamp posts in downtown Lima.’
The Ground Floor
Daniel Alarcón
‘I met Darin Rossi standing in a thick, gooey pool of fake blood, on an early-December night in Los Angeles.’
Insatiable
Mark Doty
‘Behind every man I want to kiss lies that original desire, which it is my nature and my fate to displace.’
Rub Out The Words: Letters from William Burroughs
William Burroughs & James Grauerholz
‘In order to earn my reputation I may have to start drinking my tea from a skull since this is the only vice remaining to me... four pots a day and heavy sugar.’
Necessary Daemons
Madison Smartt Bell
‘I have claimed, on suitable occasions, that my work is dictated to me by daemons, being careful to include that extra ‘a,’ so that the daemons I’m invoking may seem at least morally neutral, not out and out evil as single ‘e’ demons are mostly considered to be.’
Novel Terrors
Yuka Igarashi
‘Violence and genius and terror and mysticism reside in equal parts in the so-called heroes and so-called villains. It wells up and pervades us. We swim in it.’
