Of course, I’d lied to the editors of Vogue and told them I spoke perfect French.


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Of course, I’d lied to the editors of Vogue and told them I spoke perfect French.
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‘There’s this paradoxical nostalgia where even though yi suffered, yi miss it.’
Memoir by Graeme Armstrong.
‘She boils her sentences down to high-sucrose sweeties and calibrates her tone for maximum engagement.’
Fiction by Natasha Brown.
‘The monstrous years of my late teens lay lined up alongside the rest of my life like bullets in a gun.’
A story by Sophie Mackintosh.
‘Without waiting for me she removes her white shirt. Each button a piece of my own spine, undone.’
Fiction by K Patrick.
‘I followed him onto the dancefloor and he put his hands on my hips as if he’d known me for at least an hour.’
Fiction by Saba Sams.
Edmund White’s books include a trio of autobiographical novels, A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, as well as biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He first appeared in Granta as a translator of Milan Kundera from the French, and is now a contributing editor to the magazine. In 2018, he received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Career Achievement in American Fiction.
More about the author →‘The worst thing about knowing he was positive was that now he was under an obligation to tell his partners. Not that he informed the man he picked up in the park or the guy he lured over on the phone chatline.’
‘Once in a very great while he referred to me playfully as his ‘husband’, despite his revulsion against camp.’
A selection of Granta contributors discuss the books they read in 2012.
‘Pages five, six and seven make her into a Pakistani, but for the first four pages she is nothing but a human being.’
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