Unpacking My Library

Cultural criticism, non-fiction and the essay.

Readings past present and future for creative writing workshop, arranged A-Z by subject.
Archive of readings. Artwork above by Robin Rhode.

A, B, C

Alphabetical ordering. Abecedarium. A to Z.

Teju Cole. ‘In Place of Thought’.
Vinciane Despret, What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?
Gustave Flaubert. Dictionary of Recieved Ideas.
Jonathan Safran Foer. ‘Words/Meaning’ from Eating Animals.
Rustum Kozain, ‘The Muezzin and I’.
Czeslaw Milosz, Milosz’s ABC’s.

Animal, vegetable, mineral

Other animals. Creatures. Plants. The beyond human. Multi-species ethnography.

John Berger, ‘Why Look at Animals?’ & ‘A Load of Shit’ (‘Muck and its Entanglements’).
Cyrus Console, from Romanian Notebooks.
Annie Dillard, ‘Total Eclipse’.
Vinciane Despret, What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?
Jonathan Franzen, ‘Emptying the Skies’.
Rebecca Giggs, ‘Whale Fall’.
Anna Hartford, ‘Small Animals’.
David Haskell, from Sounds Wild and Broken.
Brooke Jarvis, ‘The Insect Apocalypse is Here’.
Rebecca May Johnson, ‘Qualities of Earth’.
Verlyn Klinkenborg, ‘What Were Dinosaurs For?’
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine’.
Primo Levi, ‘Carbon’ from The Periodic Table.
Robert Macfarlane, ‘The Understorey’, from Underland.
Colum McCann, from Apeirogon.
George Orwell, ‘Some Thoughts on the Common Toad’.
Alexa Tsoulis-Reay, ‘What It’s Like to Date a Horse.’
Merlin Sheldrake, from Entangled Life.
Amia Srinivasan, ‘The Sucker, the Sucker! (What it’s Like to be an Octopus).’
Anna Tsing, from The Mushroom at the End of the World.
David Foster Wallace, ‘Consider the Lobster’.
Virginia Woolf, ‘The Death of the Moth’.

Autofiction

Somewhere between autobiography and a novel in the first person.

Teju Cole, from Open City.
Rachel Cusk, from Outline (on creative writing classes).
Damon Galgut, from In a Strange Room.
Elizabeth Hardwick, from Sleepless Nights.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, from A Death in the Family.
Ben Lerner, from Leaving the Atocha Station.
Sigrid Nunez, ‘I Remember.’

Beginnings

False starts. Multiple perspectives. Sections. Using numbers.

95 Writing Experiments (UPenn Programme in Contemporary Writing)
Tom Bissell, ‘13 Ways of Looking at a Shooter’.
Michael Carlson, ‘Bells after Fifteen Rounds: Muhammad Ali’.
J. M. Coetzee, ‘Realism’ from Elizabeth Costello.
Ian Leslie, ‘64 Reasons to Celebrate Paul McCartney’.
Henry Louis Gates, from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.
Valeria Luiselli, ‘Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions’.
Janet Malcolm, ‘Forty-One False Starts’.
Colum McCann, from Apeirogon.
Mark O’Connell, ‘Self-Portrait in Five Fears’.
Michael Ondaatje, ‘7 or 8 Things I Know About Her (A Stolen Biography).’
Jenny Price, ‘13 Ways of Looking at Nature in L.A.’
Mary Ruefle, ‘On Beginnings’.

Body and mind, health and illness

Writing the human body. Illness and its metaphors. The medical humanities.

John Crowley, ‘The Old Imperium’.
Jonathan Franzen, ‘My Father’s Brain’.
Nadia Davids, ‘Notes from a South African Lockdown’.
Atul Gawande, ‘The Itch’ and excerpts from Being Mortal.
Nicci Gerrard, from What Dementia Teaches Us About Love.
Anna Hartford, ‘Unfathomable Life’.
John Hull, Notes on Blindness.
Leslie Jamison, ‘Devil’s Bait’.
Elsa Joubert, from Cul-de-sac (trans. Michiel Heyns).
Alexandra Kimball, ‘The Loneliness of Infertility’.
Larissa MacFarquhar, ‘The Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care’.
Oliver Sacks, ‘The Lost Mariner’.
David Sedaris, from Calypso.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, ‘Runs in the Family’.
Seneca, ‘Asthma’.
Susan Sontag, ‘Disease as Political Metaphor’.
John Updike, ‘At War with My Skin’.
Virginia Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’.

Comedy

Being funny on the page. Humour, humiliation. The lighter side. Comedy and tragicomedy.

Martin Amis, from Experience.
Tom Bissell, ‘My Holy Land Vacation’.
Terry Castle, ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ (on Susan Sontag).
Geoff Dyer, from Out of Sheer Rage.
Veronica Geng, ‘Love Trouble is My Business’ (New Yorker fiction podcast).
Ben Lerner, from Leaving the Atocha Station.
Patricia Lockwood, ‘The Communal Mind’ & ‘Malfunctioning Sex Robot’.
Lorrie Moore, ‘How to Become a Writer’.
Mark O’Connell, from To Be a Machine.
Sean O’Toole, ‘The Closing of Tygerberg Zoo’.
This American Life (podcast) #61: ‘Fiasco!’
David Sedaris, from Calypso & Me Talk Pretty One Day.
Barrett Swanson, ‘The Anxiety of Influencers’.
Wells Tower, ‘The Old Man at Burning Man’.
David Foster Wallace, ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’.

Concept and constraint

Working within limits and limitations. Conceptual writing. Rule-based writing. OULIPO.

95 Writing Experiments (UPenn Programme in Contemporary Writing).
William Dicey, from 1986.
Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith eds., Against Expression.
Alice Edy, ‘Uneasy Reading’.
Veronica Geng, ‘Love Trouble is My Business’ (New Yorker fiction podcast)
Kenneth Goldsmith, ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’.
Jonathan Lethem, ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’.
Primo Levi, ‘Carbon’ from The Periodic Table.
Valeria Luiselli, ‘Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions’.
OULIPO website.
Georges Perec, ‘The Street’ from Species of Spaces & from Life: A User’s Manual.
Mariusz Szczygieł, ‘Poland in Small Ads’.
UBUWEB.
Ivan Vladislavic, ‘Gross’ & ‘Mouse Drawing’ from The Loss Library.

Cultural criticism

Cultural history, criticism and analysis. Disagreeing, contesting, arguing. Thinking (hard).

Ashraf Jamal, from Strange Cargo.
Sianne Ngai, ‘Our Aesthetic Categories’.
Philip Roth, ‘Writing American Fiction’.
Simon Reynolds, ‘How Auto-Tune Revolutionized the Sound of Popular Music’.
Namwali Serpell, ‘The Banality of Empathy’.
Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’.
Amia Srinivasan, ‘Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?’ (on incels).
Thomas Chatterton Williams, ‘Black, Blue and Blond’.
Adam Wilson, ‘Good Bad Bad Good (What was the Golden Age of TV?)’
Emily Witt, ‘Internet Porn’.

Death, loss, trauma and tragedy

A death in the family. Old age, mourning and commemoration. Reckoning with tragedy.

Svetlana Alexievich, ‘A Human Being is Greater than War’.
James Baldwin, ‘Notes of a Native Son’.
Jo Ann Beard, ‘The Fourth State of Matter’.
Albert Camus, ‘Reflections on the Guillotine’.
Assia Djebar, from Algerian White.
Wes Enzinna, ‘Gimme Shelter’.
Jonathan Franzen, ‘My Father’s Brain’.
Atul Gawande, Excerpts from Being Mortal.
Bongani Kona, ‘The Descendants’.
Amitava Kumar, ‘Pyre’.
Primo Levi, from If This Be a Man & The Truce.
Siddhartha Mukherjee, ‘Runs in the Family’.
Andrew O’Hagan, ‘The Tower’.
Richard Lloyd Parry, ‘The School Beneath the Wave’.
‘Tuesday, and After: New York Writers Respond to 9/11’.

Difficult subjects, mixed feelings

Hard topics. Awkward people. Risky writing. Being contrary. Ambivalence. Heterodoxy.

Jay Bulger, ‘The Devil and Ginger Baker’.
Terry Castle, ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ (on Susan Sontag).
Rachel Cusk, ‘Coventry’ & ‘On Rudeness’.
William Dicey, ‘South African Pastoral’.
Jonathan Franzen, ‘On Risk and the Essay’ & ‘What if We Stopped Pretending?’
Ashraf Jamal, ‘Perverse Sincerity’ (on Anton Kannemeyer and Michelle Houellebecq).
Philip Larkin, Introduction to All What Jazz.
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Memoir of Maurice Magnus.’
Achille Mbembe, ‘The State of South African Political Life’.
Colin McAdam, ‘The Oa: On the Pleasures and Perils of Whiskey’.
Andrew O’Hagan, ‘Ghosting’ (on Julian Assange).
Sean O’Toole, ‘Memory, Image: On Rosa Luxemburg’s Prison Letters and Gender Violence’
William Hazlitt, ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’.
Michel de Montaigne, ‘How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing’.
George Orwell, ‘Reflections on Gandhi’.
Zadie Smith, ‘Getting In and Out’.
Amia Srinivasan, ‘Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?’
John Jeremian Sullivan, ‘On Michael Jackson’ & ‘Upon This Rock’.
This American Life (podcast) #220: ‘Testosterone.
Alexa Tsoulis-Reay, ‘What It’s Like to Date a Horse.’
Phillip Weiss, ‘Salman Rushdie, The Martyr’.
Emily Witt, ‘Internet Porn’.

Digital lives

Writing and/with/about the internet. Virtual lives, virtual selves. New media. Social media.

Hugh Eakin, ‘Selective Hearing: On the Specious New History Podcasts’.
Jonathan Franzen, ‘Liking is for Cowards’.
Kenneth Goldsmith,  ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’.
Anna Hartford, ‘A Kind of Seduction’.
Patricia Lockwood, ‘The Communal Mind’.
Rosa Lyster, ‘The Year in 5’.
Max Read, ‘Going Postal: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Social Media and the Death Drive’.
John Seabrook, ‘Can a Machine Learn to Write for The New Yorker?’
Zadie Smith, ‘The Social Network’.
Barrett Swanson, ‘The Anxiety of Influencers’.
Jia Tolentino, ‘The I in the Internet’.
Emily Witt, ‘Internet Dating’ from Future Sex.

Earth, ecology, humanity

Environmental non-fiction. Climate change, deep time, extinction. Writing the Anthropocene.

Svetlana Alexievich, from Voices from Chernobyl: the Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster.
John D’Agata, from About a Mountain.
Kimon de Greef, ‘The Dystopian Underworld of South Africa’s Illegal Goldmines’.
William Dicey, ‘South African Pastoral’ & ‘No Ship Exists’, from Mongrel.
Camille Dungy, ‘Is All Writing Environmental Writing?’
Jonathan Franzen, ‘What if We Stopped Pretending?’ & ‘Emptying the Skies’.
Rebecca Giggs, ‘Whale Fall’.
Nadine Gordimer, ‘On the Mines’.
Jane Hutton, from Reciprocal Landscapes.
Rebecca May Johnson, ‘Qualities of Earth’.
Elizabeth Kolbert, from The Sixth Extinction.
Robert Macfarlane, ‘The Understorey’, from Underland.
Anne McClintock, ‘Monster: A Fugue in Fire and Ice’ & ‘Ghost Forests: Atlas of a Drowning World’.
George Monbiot, from Feral.
Njabulo Ndebele, ‘Game Lodges and Leisure Colonialists’.
Mark O’Connell, from Notes from an Apocalypse.
Rob Nixon, ‘Barrier Beach’ & from Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.
Jenny Price, ‘13 Ways of Looking at Nature in L.A.’
Emily Raboteau, ‘A Year’s Diary of Climate Reckoning’ & ‘Climate Signs’.
Namwali Serpell, ‘Learning from the Kariba Dam’.
Rebecca Solnit, from Savage Dreams and Orwell’s Roses.
Anna Tsing, from The Mushroom at the End of the World.

Essay (as a form)

Thinking about the possibilities and poetics of non-fiction narrative.

T.W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’.
Jonathan Franzen, ‘On Risk and the Essay’ (Introduction to Best American Essays 2018).
Vivian Gornick, from The Situation and the Story.
Leslie Jamison, ‘What Should an Essay Do?’
Janet Malcolm, ‘The Art of Non-fiction’ (Paris Review interview).
David Shields, ‘Overture: Reality Hunger’.
Chisty Wampole, ‘The Essayification of Everything’.
Virginia Woolf, ‘The Modern Essay’.

Experimental non-fiction

Non-linear, anti-realist, deconstructed. Fiction (disguised) as non-fiction. Prose poems.

95 Writing Experiments (UPenn Programme in Contemporary Writing).
Roberto Bolano, from Nazi Literature of the Americas.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard’ & ‘An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain’.
Breyten Breytenbach, ‘The Writer Destroys Time’ (on Pollsmoor Prison).
Anne Carson, ‘Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)’.
Lydia Davis, ‘Grammar Lessons’ & ‘Burning Family Members’.
Annie Ernaux, from The Years.
Elizabeth Hardwick, from Sleepless Nights.
Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be’.
Jonathan Lethem, ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’.
Patricia Lockwood, ‘Voice’ and ‘The Communal Mind’.
Colum McCann, from Apeirogon.
Anne McClintock, ‘Monster. A Fugue in Fire and Ice’.
Lindokuhle Nkosi, ‘Yokuvala Umkhoka’.
Philip Roth, ‘“I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting”; or, Looking at Kafka’.
Mary Ruefle, ‘Lectures I Will Never Give’ & ‘Monument’.
John Jeremiah Sullivan, ‘Man Called Fran’.
Ivan Vladislavic, ‘Mouse Drawing’ and ‘Gross’ from The Loss Library.

Family matters

Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. Siblings. Grandparents. Aunts, uncles, cousins etc.

James Baldwin, ‘Notes of a Native Son’.
Elif Batuman, ‘Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry’.
Rachel Cusk, ‘Coventry’.
Moyra Davey ed., from Mother Reader: Essential Writings on Motherhood.
Lydia Davis, ‘Grammar Lessons’ & ‘Burning Family Members’.
Geoff Dyer. ‘On Being an Only Child’.
Annie Ernaux, from A Frozen Woman.
Jonathan Franzen, ‘My Father’s Brain’.
Anna Hartford, ‘Light and Time’.
Marlon James, ‘One Day I Will Write About My Mother’.
Karen Jennings, from Travels with My Father.
Franz Kafka, Brief an den Vater (‘Dearest Father’).
Karl Ove Knausgaard, Fatherhood (selections from A Man in Love).
Siddhartha Mukherjee, ‘Runs in the Family’.
Frances Stonor Saunders, ‘The Suitcase’.
Sara Suleri, from Meatless Days.
Thomas Chatterton Williams, ‘Black, Blue and Blond’.

Food

Feasts and fasts. The pleasures and pains of eating. Cooking and kitchens. Matters of taste.

J. M. Coetzee, ‘Meat Country’.
Jonathan Safran Foer, from Eating Animals.
Gabrielle Hamilton, ‘My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years’.
Rustum Kozain, ‘The Muezzin and I’.
George Orwell, from Down and Out in Paris and London.
Michael Pollan, from The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
Emily Raboteau, ‘A Year’s Diary of Climate Reckoning’.
Jerry Saltz, ‘My Appetites’.
Sara Suleri, from Meatless Days.
David Foster Wallace, ‘Consider the Lobster’.

Graphic non-fiction

Non-fiction comics. Drawn stories. Graphic memoir and travelogues.

Alison Bechdel, from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.
Roz Chast, from Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Guy Delisle, from Pyongang: A Journey in North Korea.
Anton Kannemeyer, ‘Barries’, ‘Jeugweerbaarheid/ Youth Preparedness’, ‘Boetie/Sonny’, ‘Die Taal’, ‘True Love’, ‘Frikkadel’, ‘Die Hemel Hel Ons Deel’, ‘Die Strand’ (selections from Bitterkomix and others).
Marjane Satrapi, from Persepolis.
Shaun Tan, from The Arrival.

Home truths

Narrative non-fiction post-apartheid. Standalone pieces only.

Panashe Chigumadzi, ‘Rights of Conquest, Rights of Desire’, ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to Nigerians about Race’.
Sean Christie, ‘Searching for the Soul of the Jukskei’, ‘Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard’ (Africa is a Country).
William Dicey, ‘A Story in Which Everyone Looks Bad’, ‘South African Pastoral’, in Mongrel.
Jacob Dlamini, ‘The Language of Nostlagia’, ‘The Bequest’, ‘The Death of Jacob Dlamini’.
Madeleine Fullard, ‘Investigation Pieces’.
Mark Gevisser, ‘Edenvale’, ‘Inheritance’.
Kimon de Greef, ‘The Dystopian Underworld of South Africa’s Illegal Goldmines’.
Anna Hartford, ‘Light and Time’, ‘Unfathomable Life’.
Simone Haysom, ‘The Life and Death of Rowan du Preez’ (in Safe House).
Michiel Heyns, ‘On Graciousness and Convenience: Cape Cottaging 1960–1980’.
Bongani Kona, ‘The Descendants’.
Adrian Leftwich, ‘I Gave the Names’.
Bongani Madondo, ‘Enoch Mgijima’s Black Israelites’, in Sigh, the Beloved Country.
Rustum Kozain, ‘Dagga’, ‘The Muezzin and I’.
Rosa Lyster, ‘Quarter Century, or The Year I was 25’.
Liz McGregor, ‘Who Killed the Rain Queen?’
Rian Malan, ‘In the Jungle’, ‘Nemesis’, ‘The Last Afrikaner’.
Achille Mbembe, ‘Why Am I Here?’, ‘Excerpts from My Diary’
Zanele Miji, ‘Those Graves Were Our Title Deeds’.
Lidudumalingani Mqombothi, ‘Fighting Shadows’
Njabulo Ndebele, ‘Game Lodges and Leisure Colonalists’, ‘Thinking of Brenda’.
Lindokuhle Nkosi, ‘Yokuvala Umkhoka’ (on Miriam Makeba).
Julia Nxadi, ‘The End of a Conversation’, ‘Letter to the Academy’.
Sean O’Toole, ‘The Closing of Tygerberg Zoo’, ‘Memory, Image: On Rosa Luxemburg’s Prison Letters and Gender Violence’, ‘Paparazzi Bang-Bangers’, ‘Three Men, a Fence and a Dead Body’.
Ivor Powell, ‘The Anxiety of Identity and Some Afrikaners’ (on David Goldblatt), ‘A Slight Small Youngster with an Enormous Rosary’ (on Ernest Cole).
Lin Sampson, ‘Now You’ve Gone ‘n Killed Me’ (on Billy Monk).
Kwanele Sosibo, ‘The Warm Up’.
Jonny Steinberg, ‘The Defeated’.
Niren Tolsi, ‘Marikana: A Miner’s Story’.
Henk van Woerden, ‘The Assassin’.
Ivan Vladislavic, ‘On Flea Market Finds and Other Objects’ (in David Southwood, Milnerton Market), ‘On the Verge’.
Stephen Watson, ‘A Version of Melancholy’, ‘Buiten Street’.

Interviews

Long-form interviews. Extended conversations. Q&A’s. Dialogues and colloquies.

J. M. Coetzee, from Doubling the Point (with David Attwell).
Teju Cole in conversation with David Naimon, Between the Covers (podcast).
Johnny Dyani in conversation with Aryan Kaganoff, ‘The Forest and the Zoo’.
David Goldblatt, The Last Interview (with Alexandra Dodd).
Marlon James in conversation with Adam Buxton (podcast).
Qunicy Jones, ‘In Conversation’ (with David Marchese).
Bongani Kona interviewed by Catherine Boulle, Institute for the Creative Arts (podcast).
Primo Levi, ‘Conversation in Turin’ (with Philip Roth).
Jonny Steinberg, ‘Counting the Costs of Non-fiction’ (with Daniel Lehman).
Bongani Madondo, ‘Dr Malombo: The Ultimate Conversation’.
Janet Malcolm, ‘The Art of Nonfiction No. 4’, Paris Review (with Katie Roiphe).
Adam Phillips, ‘The Art of Nonfiction No. 7’, Paris Review (with Paul Holdengräber).
Emily Raboteau, ‘A Year’s Diary of Climate Reckoning’.
Jon Ronson with Russell Brand, ‘Porn, Sadness and Madness’ (podcast).
Philip Roth, ‘The Art of Fiction No. 84’, Paris Review (with Hermione Lee).
Zadie Smith in conversation with Adam Buxton (podcast).

Intoxication

Drugs and alcohol, binges and benders. Highs and lows. Addiction.

Walter Benjamin, ‘Hashish in Marseilles’.
Tom Bissell, ‘Video Games: the Addiction’.
Herman Charles Bosman, ‘Dagga (Chapter Three)’ from Cold Stone Jug.
Rustum Kozain, ‘Dagga’.
Colin McAdam, ‘The Oa: On the Pleasures and Perils of Whiskey’.
Wells Tower, ‘The Old Man at Burning Man’.

Journeys

Setting out. (Beyond) travel writing and tourism. Foreign and not-so-foreign destinations.

Tom Bissell, ‘My Holy Land Vacation’.
Teju Cole, ‘Caravaggio’s Paintings’.
Guy Delisle, from Pyongang: A Journey in North Korea.
Jamaica Kincaid, from A Small Place.
Robert Macfarlane, ‘Invisible Cities’ from Underland.
Njabulo Ndebele, ‘Game Lodges and Leisure Colonialists’.
Sean O’Toole, ‘Revisiting the Landscapes of [Sol Plaatje’s] Native Life’.
Johny Pitts, from Afropean.
David Foster Wallace, ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’.

Letters

Letters sent and unsent. Epistolary forms.

A letter to… *
James Baldwin, ‘Letter from a Region in My Mind’ and The Fire Next Time.
Albert Camus, ‘Letter to a German Friend’ & ‘Letter to an Algerian Militant’.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Between the World and Me.
Leonard Cohen, ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’.
Franz Kafka, ‘Dearest Father’.
David Scott, from Stuart Hall’s Voice.
Oscar Wilde, from De Profundis.

* The A letter to... series ran from 2006 to 2021, featuring more than 600 letters that Guardian readers had always wanted to write to key people in their lives.

Listening

Writing on music, sound, noise. Living with music.

Jay Bulger, ‘The Devil and Ginger Baker’.
Meghan Daum, ‘Music is My Bag’.
Geoff Dyer, from But Beautiful.
Ralph Ellison, ‘Living with Music’.
Elizabeth Hardwick, from Sleepless Nights (on Billie Holiday).
David Haskell, from Sounds Wild and Broken.
Aryan Kaganoff and Johnny Dyani, ‘The Forest and the Zoo’.
Aryan Kaganoff, ‘To Freedom Condemned’ (on Dudu Pukwana).
Ilya Kaminsky, ‘Ears: To Odesa’ (podcast).
Philip Larkin, Introduction to All What Jazz.
Ian Leslie, ‘The Banality of Genius’ (on The Beatles) & ‘64 Reasons to Celebrate Paul McCartney’.
Patricia Lockwood, ‘Voice’ from Priestdaddy.
Bongani Madondo, ‘Dr Malombo: The Ultimate Conversation’.
Rian Malan, ‘In the Jungle’.
Hugh Masekela, from Still Grazing.
Achille Mbembe, ‘Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds’.
Lindokuhle Nkosi, ‘Yokuvala Umkhoka’.
Simon Reynolds, ‘How Auto-Tune Revolutionized the Sound of Popular Music’.
Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Primal Sound’.
Alex Ross, ‘I Saw the Light: Following Bob Dylan’.
Luigi Russolo, ‘The Art of Noises’ (Futurist manifesto, 1913).
Oliver Sacks, from Musicophilia.
Richard Sennett, ‘Resistance’.
Philip Sherburne, ‘The Strange Story of “Township Funk”’.
Zadie Smith, ‘Dance Lessons for Writers’ & ‘Some Notes on Attunement’.
John Jeremiah Sullivan, ‘Back in the Day’ (on Michael Jackson).
David Toop, from Ocean of Sound.
Roger Young, ‘Fresh Fruits, Rotten Vegetables’ (Afropunk).
Stephen Watson, ‘Leonard Cohen and Longing’.

Looking

Working with images, photographs, pictures, film, the visual.

Roland Barthes, from Camera Lucida.
John Berger, ‘Appearances’, ‘The Suit and the Photograph’ & from Berger on Drawing.
Italo Calvino, ‘A Cinema-Goer’s Autobiography’.
Tina M. Campt, from Listening to Images.
Teju Cole, ‘Google’s Macchia’.
Jacob Dlamini, from The Terrorist Album.
Geoff Dyer, ‘On the Roof’.
Mark Gevisser, ‘Inheritance’, ‘Coetzee’s Boyhood Photographs’.
David Goldblatt, The Last Interview (with Alexandra Dodd).
Anna Hartford, ‘Light and Time’.
Saidiya Hartman, ‘A Minor Figure’ (excerpt from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments).
Ashraf Jamal, ‘Zanele Muholi: Reading Room’, ‘Anton Kannemeyer: Perverse Sincerity’.
Ian Leslie, ‘The Banality of Genius’ (on The Beatles).
Sean O’Toole, ‘Memory, Image: On Rosa Luxemburg’s Prison Letters and Gender Violence’, ‘Paparazzi Bang-Bangers’.
Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet.
Ivor Powell, ‘The Anxiety of Identity and Some Afrikaners’ (on David Goldblatt), ‘A Slight Small Youngster with an Enormous Rosary’ (on Ernest Cole).
Zadie Smith, ‘Alte Frau by Balthasar Denner’ & ‘Getting In and Out’.
Susan Sontag, ‘In Plato’s Cave’ from On Photography.
David Southwood, from Milnerton Market.
Adam Wilson, ‘Good Bad Bad Good (What was the Golden Age of TV?)’

Me, myself and I

First person singular. Autobiographical acts. The art of personal narrative. See also: Memoir.

Italo Calvino, ‘A Cinema-Goer’s Autobiography’.
Geoff Dyer, ‘On Being an Only Child’.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’.
Anton Kannemeyer, ‘Barries’, ‘Jeugweerbaarheid/ Youth Preparedness’, ‘Boetie/Sonny’, ‘Die Taal’, ‘True Love’, ‘Frikkadel’, ‘Die Hemel Hel Ons Deel’, ‘Die Strand’ (selections from Bitterkomix and other graphic nonfiction).
Édouard Levé, ‘When I Look at a Strawberry I Think of a Tongue’.
Adrian Leftwich. ‘I Gave the Names’.
Rosa Lyster, ‘Quarter Century, or The Year I was 25’.
Janet Malcolm, ‘Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography.’
Colin McAdam, ‘The Oa: On the Pleasures and Perils of Whiskey’.
Jeremiah Moss, ‘Open House’.
Es’kia Mphahlele, ‘Exile, the Literary Compromise and the Tyranny of Place’.
Mark O’Connell, ‘Self-Portrait in Five Fears’.
George Orwell, ‘A Hanging’ & ‘Shooting an Elephant’.
Jerry Saltz, ‘My Life as a Failed Artist’.
Jia Tolentino, ‘The I in the Internet’.
Thomas Chatterton Williams, from Losing My Cool.

Memoir

I remember…

Joe Brainard, ‘I Remember’.
Meghan Daum, ‘Music is My Bag’.
Joan Didion, ‘Goodbye to All That’.
Annie Dillard, ‘Total Eclipse’
Jacob Dlamini, ‘The Language of Nostalgia’.
Ralph Ellison, ‘Living with Music’.
Annie Ernaux, from The Years.
Elizabeth Hardwick, from Sleepless Nights.
Denis Hirson, from I Remember King Kong (the Boxer).
C. L. R. James, ‘The Window’ from Beyond a Boundary.
Elsa Joubert, from Cul-de-sac (trans. Michiel Heyns).
Bongani Kona, ‘The Descendants’.
Rustum Kozain, ‘Dagga’.
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Memoir of Maurice Magnus’.
Hugh Masekela, from Still Grazing.
Lewis Nkosi, ‘The Fabulous Decade: The Fifties’.
Sigrid Nunez, ‘I Remember.’
George Orwell, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’.
Georges Perec, from I Remember.
Stephen Watson, ‘Buiten Street’.
Virginia Woolf, ‘A Sketch of the Past’.

See also:
Memory and Forgetting (literatures of dementia, Alzheimer’s and lost memories).

The (mis)education of…

Schooldays, coming of age, rites of passage. See also: Memoir.

Chinua Achebe, ‘The Education of a British-Protected Child’.
Panashe Chigumadzi, ‘Rites of Conquest, Rights of Desire’.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Between the World and Me.
J. M. Coetzee, ‘Remembering Texas’.
Nadine Gordimer, ‘Notes of an Expropriator’.
Zbigniew Herbert, ‘Biology Teacher’.
Rustum Kozain, ‘Dagga’.
Es’kia Mphahlele, ‘Exile, the Tyranny of Place and the Literary Compromise’
George Orwell, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’.

Notebooks, diaries, journals

Day to day. Recording, reflecting, marking time. Confessing. Noticing.

From The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists, ed. Taylor.
John Cheever, from The Journals of John Cheever, introduced by Geoff Dyer.
J. M. Coetzee, ‘From Summertime: Notebooks 1972–1975’.
Nadia Davids, ‘Notes from a South African Lockdown’.
Joan Didion, ‘On Keeping a Notebook’.
Athol Fugard, from Notebooks 1960 -1977.
Jean Giono, from Occupation Journal.
Witold Gombrowicz, from Diary.
Simon Gray, from The Smoking Diaries.
Sean O’Toole, ‘Diary of a Bad Half Year’.
‘Pandemic Journal’ (New York Review of Books).
Patricia Lockwood, ‘The Communal Mind’.
Madeleine Lucas, ‘My Time in Texas with Sam Shepard’s Notebooks’.
Dambudzo Marechera, ‘The Journal’ from Mindblast.
Yoko Ogawa, ‘Pregnancy Diary’.
Emily Raboteau, ‘A Year’s Diary of Climate Reckoning’.
George Saunders, ‘The Semplica Girls’.
Stephen Watson, from A Writer’s Diary.
‘What We’ve Learned’ (New York Times magazine writers responding to COVID-19).

Object lessons

Working with things, artefacts, elements & objects. Commodity biography. Stories of stuff.

Oliver Balch, ‘The Curse of White Oil: Electric Vehicles’ Dirty Secret’.
Italo Calvino, ‘The Petrol Pump’.
Jacob Dlamini, from The Terrorist Album.
Anna Hartford, ‘Hello, Fridge’.
Jane Hutton, from Reciprocal Landscapes.
Primo Levi, ‘Carbon’ from The Periodic Table.
John Ruskin, ‘The Work of Iron’.
Frances Stonor Saunders, ‘The Suitcase’.
Anna Tsing, from The Mushroom at the End of the World.
Ivan Vladislavic, ‘On Flea Market Finds and Other Objects’ in David Southwood, Milnerton Market.

Ordinary things

The everyday, the ordinary, the mundane.

John Berger, ‘A Load of Shit’ (‘Muck and its Entanglements’).
Alain de Botton, ‘Biscuit Manufacture’ & from The News: A User’s Manual.
G. K. Chesterton. ‘On Lying in Bed’ & ‘A Piece of Chalk’.
Rachel Cusk, ‘Driving as Metaphor’.
William Hazlitt, ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’.
Georges Perec, ‘The Street’ from Species of Spaces & ‘The Infraordinary’.
Bertrand Russell, ‘In Praise of Idleness’.
Seneca, ‘On Noise’.
Namwali Serpell, ‘[Face With Tears of Joy Emoji]; or Word of the Year’.
Sei Shonagon, ‘Hateful Things’.
Virginia Woolf, ‘The Death of the Moth’.

On writing and creative process

Writers on writing. Tips, maxims, guidelines, handbooks. Rules of the game.

Italo Calvino, ‘Exactitude’ from Six Memos for the Next Millenium.
Joan Didion, ‘On Keeping a Notebook’.
Annie Dillard, ‘Write Til You Drop’.
Vivian Gornick, from The Situation and the Story.
William Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons (lectures).
Stephen Koch, ‘Beginnnings’ from The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop.
Amitava Kumar, from Every Day I Write the Book.
Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘Prides: An Essay on Writing Workshops’ & ‘The Question I Get Asked Most Often’.
Janet Malcolm, ‘The Art of Nonfiction No. 4’, Paris Review (with Katie Roiphe).
John McPhee, ‘Draft No. 4’.
James Miller, ‘Is Bad Writing Necessary?’
Lorrie Moore, ‘How to Be a Writer’.
Joe Moran, ‘Good Sentences’.
George Orwell, ‘Why I Write’ & ‘Politics and the English Language’.
Adam Phillips, ‘The Art of Nonfiction No. 7’, Paris Review (with Paul Holdengräber).
Philip Roth, ‘The Art of Fiction No. 84’, Paris Review (with Hermione Lee).
George Saunders, ‘What Writers Really Do When They Write’.
W. G. Sebald, ‘Collected Maxims’.
Zadie Smith, ‘Dance Lessons for Writers’ & ‘That Crafty Feeling’.
William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style (illustrated).
Mark Tredinnick, ‘On the Craft of the Sentence’.

Polemic

Anger, rage, argument. A verbal or written attack.

Albert Camus, ‘Reflections on the Guillotine’.
Terry Eagleton, ‘In the Gaudy Supermarket’.
Jonathan Franzen, ‘Liking is for Cowards’.
Witold Gombrowicz, ‘Against Poets’.
David Graeber, ‘Against Economics’.
William Hazlitt, ‘On the Pleasure of Hating’.
Jamaica Kincaid, from A Small Place.
Patricia Lockwood, ‘Malfunctioning Sex Robot’ (on John Updike).
James Miller, ‘Is Bad Writing Necessary?’
Jeremiah Moss, ‘Open House’.
Max Read, ‘Going Postal’.
Arundhati Roy, ‘The End of Imagination’.
Philip Roth, ‘Writing About Jews’.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to The Wretched of the Earth.
Sei Shonagon, ‘Hateful Things’.
Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’ & from ‘Tuesday, and After: New York Writers Respond to 9/11’.

Portrait and profile

Writing about others. Biography. Profiles, portraits and double portraits. Self and other.

Hilton Als, ‘Tristes Tropiques’.
Al Alvarez, from Feeding the Rat: Profile of a Climber.
Diana Athill, ‘Editing Vidia’ (on V. S. Naipaul).
James Baldwin, ‘Notes of a Native Son’.
Cath Boulle and John Withers, ‘Einstein Fix: an Electronic Symphony.’
Jay Bulger, ‘The Devil and Ginger Baker’.
Terry Castle, ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ (on Susan Sontag).
Mark Gevisser, ‘Love in Exile’ (on Tiwonge Chimbalanga).
Natalia Ginzburg, ‘He and I’.
Adam Gopnik, ‘Last of the Metrozoids’.
Elizabeth Hardwick, from Sleepless Nights (on Billie Holiday).
Marlon James, ‘One Day I Will Write About My Mother’.
Simon Leys, ‘Orwell: The Horror of Politics’.
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Memoir of Maurice Magnus.’
Larissa MacFarquhar, ‘Last Call’.
Rian Malan, ‘The Last Afrikaner’.
Alberto Manguel, With Borges.
Njabulo Ndebele, ‘Thinking of Brenda’ (on Brenda Fassie).
Lindokuhle Nkosi, ‘Yokuvala Umkhoka’ (on Miriam Makeba).
George Orwell, ‘Reflections on Gandhi’.
Sean O’Toole, ‘Paparazzi Bang-Bangers’.
William Plomer, from Cecil Rhodes.
Claudia Roth Pierpont, ‘Memoirs of a Revolutionary’ (on Doris Lessing).
Claudia Rankine, ‘The Meaning of Serena Williams’.
Lin Sampson, ‘Now You’ve Gone ‘n Killed Me’ (on Billy Monk).
Adam Shatz, ‘Where Life is Seized’ (on Frantz Fanon).
John Jeremiah Sullivan, ‘Back in the Day’ (on Michael Jackson) & ‘Mr Lytle’.
Phillip Weiss, ‘Salman Rushdie, The Martyr’.
Henk van Woerden ‘The Assassin’ (on Demetrios Tsafendas).

Reading, re-reading (and not reading)

Creative criticism. Personal criticism. ‘The critical intelligence in the imaginative position.’

Margaret Atwood, ‘Dire Cartographies’.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Unpacking My Library’.
Elif Batuman, ‘The Murder of Leo Tolstoy’.
Italo Calvino, ‘Why Read the Classics?’
Panashe Chigumadzi, ‘Rights of Conquest, Rights of Desire’.
J. M. Coetzee, ‘Realism’ from Elizabeth Costello.
Teju Cole, ‘Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village”’.
Alain de Botton, from How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel.
Samuel Delany, ‘To Read The Dispossessed’.
William Dicey, ‘No Ship Exists’.
Assia Djebar, from Algerian White.
Geoff Dyer, from Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence.
Vivian Gornick, ‘The Only Reader is a Re-Reader’.
Alice Kaplan, from Looking for the Stranger (on Albert Camus).
William Kentridge, ‘These Things Do Happen’.
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Moby Dick’.
Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be’.
Patricia Lockwood, ‘Malfunctioning Sex Robot’ (on John Updike).
Rosa Lyster, ‘Quarter Century, or The Year I was 25’.
Alberto Manguel, With Borges.
Larry McMurtry, ‘On Rereading’.
Pankaj Mishra, ‘Reading Edmund Wilson in Benares’.
Vladimir Nabokov, from Nikolai Gogol.
Sean O’Toole, ‘Revisiting the Landscapes of [Sol Plaatje’s] Native Life’.
George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’.
Johny Pitts, from Afropean (on James Baldwin).
Philip Roth, ‘“I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting”; or, Looking at Kafka’.
Mary Ruefle, ‘My Emily Dickinson’ & ‘Madness, Rack, and Honey’.
Salman Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’.
Zadie Smith, ‘The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi’.
Rebecca Solnit, from Orwell’s Roses.
Stephen Watson, ‘The Clarities of Hemingway’.
Thomas Chatterton Williams, ‘Black, Blue and Blond’.
James Wood, ‘A Fine Rage: George Orwell’s Revolutions’.

Review essays

More than just your average book review.

Tom Crewe, ‘Here Was a Plague’.
Terry Eagleton, ‘In the Gaudy Supermarket’.
Verlyn Klinkenborg, ‘What Were Dinosaurs For?’
Benjamin Kunkel, ‘The Capitalocene’.
Jonathan Lethem, ‘Snowden in the Labyrinth’.
Mark O’Connell, ‘Shooting Werner Herzog’.
Charles Petersen, ‘Serfs of Academe’.
Adam Shatz, ‘Where Life is Seized’ (on Frantz Fanon).
Zadie Smith, ‘Getting In and Out’ & ‘The Social Network’.
Amia Srinivasan, ‘The Sucker, the Sucker! (What it’s Like to be an Octopus)’.
Gabriel Winant, ‘Not Every Kid Bond Matures’.
James Wolcott, ‘Sisyphus at the Selectric’ (on Philip Roth and his biographers).

The scientific imagination

Writing biology, evolution, physics, astronomy, genetics, zoology, geology, oceanography…

Italo Calvino, ‘A Tranquil Star’.
Rachel Carson, from The Sea Around Us and Silent Spring.
James Elkins, from Six Stories from the Edge of Representation.
David Haskell, from Sounds Wild and Broken.
Verlyn Klinkenborg, ‘What Were Dinosaurs For?’
Elizabeth Kolbert, from The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.
Primo Levi, ‘Carbon’ from The Periodic Table.
Robert Macfarlane, ‘The Understory’.
Siddatha Mukherjee, from The Gene: An Intimate History & ‘Runs in the Family’.
Merlin Sheldrake, from Entangled Life.
Nicola Twilley, ‘How the First Gravitational Waves Were Found’.

Site specific

Space and place. Walking. Cities. Psychic geographies. Landscape and memory.

Chris Abani, ‘Lagos: A Pilgrimage in Notations’.
Gaston Bachelard, from The Poetics of Space.
Sean Christie, ‘Searching for the Soul of the Jukskei’.
Teju Cole, from Open City.
Mike Davis, from City of Quartz (on Los Angeles).
Guy Debord, ‘Theory of the Derive’.
Guy Delisle, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City.
Wes Enzinna, ‘Gimme Shelter’.
Nadine Gordimer, ‘On the Mines’.
Simone Haysom, ‘Excellent Baddie Territory’.
Amitava Kumar, ‘The Rat’s Guide’.
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Taos’.
Rosa Lyster, ‘DURBS DURBS DURBS’.
Robert Macfarlane, ‘Invisible Cities’ from Underland.
Colum McCann, from Apeirogon.
Suketu Mehta, from Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.
Joseph Mitchell, ‘The Bottom of the Harbour’.
Jeremiah Moss, ‘Open House’.
Sean O’Toole, ‘The Closing of Tygerberg Zoo’.
Georges Perec, ‘The Street’ and ‘The Infra-ordinary’ from Species of Spaces.
Hugh Raffles, ‘The Stones of Lewis’, from The Book of Unconformities.
Henrietta Rose-Innes, ‘Five Sites’.
Noo Saro-Wiwa, ‘A Fetching Destination’.
Raja Shehadeh, from Palestinian Walks.
Rebecca Solnit, from Savage Dreams.
David Southwood, Milnerton Market. With essays by Ivan Vladislavic and Ivor Powell.
Ivan Vladislavic, from Portrait with Keys: Joburg and what-what.
Stephen Watson, ‘A Version of Melancholy’.
Tim Winton, from Island Home.
Ilze Wolff, from Unstitching Rex Trueform: The Story of an African Factory.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Street Haunting’.

Subcultures

The gang, the group. Cults. Professions and specializations. Jargons, lingo, slang.

Al Alvarez, from Feeding the Rat: Profile of a Climber.
Elif Batuman, ‘Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry’.
Breyten Breytenbach, ‘The Writer Destroys Time’ (on Pollsmoor Prison).
Sean Christie, ‘Under Nelson Mandela Boulevard’.
Alain de Botton, ‘Biscuit Manufacture’.
Kimon de Greef, ‘The Dystopian Underworld of South Africa’s Illegal Goldmines’.
Geoff Dyer, from Another Great Day at Sea.
Ben Lerner, ‘Contest of Words’.
Janet Malcolm, from Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession.
Mark O’Connell, from Notes from an Apocalypse.
George Orwell, from Down and Out in Paris and London.
Hugh Raffles, ‘Cricket Fighting’.
Nathaniel Rich, ‘The Man Who Saves You From Yourself’.
John Jeremiah Sullivan, ‘Upon this Rock’.
George Saunders, ‘Who Are All These Trump Supporters?’.
Richard Sennett, ‘Resistance’.
Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on Camp’.
Barrett Swanson, ‘The Anxiety of Influencers’ & ‘Men at Work’.
Wells Tower, ‘The Old Man at Burning Man’.
Emily Witt, ‘Internet Porn’.
Roger Young, ‘Fresh Fruits, Rotten Vegetables’ (on Durban Afropunk).

The sportswriter

Writing about sport, games, pastimes.

Al Alvarez, from Feeding the Rat: Profile of a Climber.
William Finnegan, ‘Playing Doc’s Games’.
Richard Ford, from The Sportswriter.
Paul Fournel, from Need for the Bike.
William Hazlitt, ‘The Fight’.
C. L R. James, ‘The Window’ from Beyond a Boundary.
Sam Knight, ‘Follow the White Ball’.
Bongani Kona, ‘Boyhood and Transit’.
Lidudumalingani Mqombothi, ‘Fighting Shadows’
Claudia Rankine, ‘The Meaning of Serena Williams’.
David Foster Wallace, ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience’.

Uncreative writing

Found text. Against expression. Algorithms. Machine learning. AI.

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Pierre Menard’.
Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith eds., Against Expression.
Kenneth Goldsmith, ‘Proudly Fraudulent’ & ‘Why Conceptual Writing?’
Anna Hartford, ‘A Kind of Seduction’.
Jonathan Lethem, ‘The Ecstasy of Influence’.
John Seabrook, ‘Can a Machine Learn to Write for The New Yorker?’
Eliot Weinberger, ‘The Dream of India’.

Voices

Oral history. Recording the stories of others. Interviewing and transcribing. The human voice.

Svetlana Alexievich, from The Unwomanly Face of War.
Svetlana Alexievich, from Voices from Chernobyl: the Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster.
Cath Boulle and John Withers, ‘Einstein Fix: an Electronic Symphony.’
Colors magazine vol. 47: Madness / Folie.
Ilya Kaminsky, ‘Ears: To Odesa’ (podcast).
Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni and Kopano Ratele, from There Was This Goat.
Valeria Luiselli, ‘Tell Me How it Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions’.
Rigoberta Menchú, from I, Rigoberta Menchú.
Jelly Roll Morton, from The Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax.
‘Tanqueray’ (and co.) from Humans of New York.
Emily Raboteau, ‘A Year’s Diary of Climate Reckoning’.

Work

Labour. Making a living. Professions. The sorrows and pleasures of work.

Alain de Botton, ‘Cargo Ship Spotting’, ‘Logistics’ & ‘Biscuit Manufacture’.
William Dicey, ‘South African Pastoral’.
Geoff Dyer, from Another Great Day at Sea.
Barbara Ehrenreich, from Nickel and Dimed.
David Graeber, from Bullshit Jobs.
Anna Hartford, ‘Odd Jobs’.
Primo Levi, from The Periodic Table and The Wrench.
Janet Malcolm, from Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession.
Joseph Mitchell, ‘The Bottom of the Harbour’.
George Orwell, from Down and Out in Paris and London.
Bertrand Russell, ‘In Praise of Idleness’.
John Jeremiah Sullivan, ‘Man Called Fran’.
Nicola Twilley, ‘How the First Gravitational Waves Were Found’.