Granta | The Home of New Writing

Having and Being Had

Carrot Bread

Annabel Banks

‘A short story is a loose-knit sweater, a trawler’s net, where the spaces and holes are inseparable from the whole.’

Fracture

Andrés Neuman

‘Sometimes, in the midst of one of our arguments, he would say to me sadly, I understand you more if I understand less.’

Plague Diary: April

Gonçalo M. Tavares

‘Pictures from some cities in Latin America: the burning in front of the family home of the dead who are not collected by the state.’

Introduction

Rana Dasgupta

‘We cherish communion, exchange and intercourse, of course, but also distance, seclusion and defence. Talk of membranes, therefore, is never entirely literal.’

Tissue

Tishani Doshi

‘Even if you could walk through the corridors / of your body, you would not know which rooms / to enter, which were full of stone.’

Newts

Anita Roy

‘Under a microscope, its skin looks lacy and netted, and it is this very porousness that makes these creatures so vulnerable.’

Hold Your Fire

Chloe Wilson

‘While waiting for his faecal transplant, my husband wasn’t as fun as he used to be.’

Laxmi

Anita Khemka & Rana Dasgupta

‘Anita’s documentation of Laxmi developed into what has become a lifelong friendship bound by photography.’

Rana Dasgupta introduces the photography of Anita Khemka.

Self

Tishani Doshi

‘We all want to be / monuments but can’t help shoving our fingers / in dirt.’

The Station

J. Robert Lennon

‘You’re gonna want to go down the other side of the mountain and check out the Facility. Don’t do it.’

Secondhand

Mónica de la Torre

‘Eerily animated, it’s as if the gloves persist in their attempt to express something that can’t be reduced to words, something untranslatable.’

Hair

Mahreen Sohail

‘The first person he tells is his girlfriend of one year. I’m going to donate my hair to my mother, he says, and is worried to see tears rise in her eyes.’

Learning to Sing

Lydia Davis

‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’

Collective

Tishani Doshi

‘If you need proof you’re alive, regard the oar / in your hand.’

Snap

Anouchka Grose

‘What a strange, terrible, exciting present – something you have to defile in order to appreciate.’

from the knotweed sonnets

Andrew McMillan

‘sometimes I need / the sound of something pulled up from the roots / and tossed aside’

You Are Here, You Are Not a Ghost

Mark Doty

‘Does it make you a little ghostly yourself, when what’s gone is more present for you than what’s here?’

Nation

Tishani Doshi

‘Understand friend, the conscience is a delicate broth. / Sometimes it feels good to be bad.’

Diminishing Returns

Fatin Abbas

‘Alex had been sent to this remote district between north and south Sudan to update maps. It was an information-gathering project run by an American NGO based in the capital, Khartoum, nine hundred kilometers to the north.’

Crimes of Space

Eyal Weizman & Rana Dasgupta

‘Architecture can be employed as a form of violence and violation.’

Border Documents

Arturo Soto

‘The twin cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez lie either side of the US–Mexico border.’

As if in Prayer

Steven Heighton

‘Many of the life vests were useless fakes, nylon shells that the human traffickers had stuffed with bubble wrap, boxboard, sawdust or rags.’

Species

Tishani Doshi

‘Will it be for them / as it was for us, impossible to imagine oceans where there are now / mountains?’

The Lake

Kapka Kassabova

‘The chalky mountain separates the lake from its higher, non-identical twin, but only overground. Underground, they are connected. Ohrid and Prespa: two lakes, one ecosystem.’

Between Light and Storm

Esther Woolfson

‘We’ve always been entwined in life and in death with other creatures, although often too much time has elapsed to be able to interpret with any certainty what some of these symbols and artefacts mean.’

Click-Wrap

Ida Börjel

‘You know about my / emotional drinking, and my night walks and my / fragmented heart-to-heart conversations.’

All Species Have the Same Life

Emanuele Coccia

‘I have in me the vestiges of an endless series of living beings, all born of other living beings.’

Cosmos

Tishani Doshi

‘Remember when we were / young and the end was a black hole at the edge of forever, / a million light years away.’

Clarity

Ruchir Joshi

‘I was close to my own father, which many people are not.’

Ruchir Joshi remembers his son.

Already Two

Vladimir Mayakovsky

‘I’m in no hurry; I’ll not storm your dreams’

Words for Woman

Susana Moreira Marques

‘What we need, now, is: Mrs Dalloway in London, but as an immigrant’

How much faith can we place in coronavirus antibody tests?

Megan Price, Morgan Agnew & David Peters

Why is it so hard to roll out accurate antibody tests? Statisticians break down the challenges that come with testing for coronavirus immunity.

In Conversation

Saskia Vogel & Jen Calleja

‘Narrative is control, dominance, purposeful withholding, flirting’

What History Tells Us About Epidemics

Sandra Hempel

‘From when we first began living together in settlements, bacteria and viruses were with us, replicating, mutating and jumping species with extraordinary agility.’

Fable

Kathryn Scanlan

‘The girl’s curiosity often led her into troublesome situations, but she considered it part of the pact her soul had made in order to gain entrance to the world, and did not worry much over what befell her.’

New fiction from Kathryn Scanlan.

The Smart House of Mrs O

Lincoln Michel

‘I looked around at my apartment, wondering if there was anything gazing back.’

New fiction from Lincoln Michel.