Granta | The Home of New Writing

Tomorrow, upon Awakening

Bill Morgan | Interview

Bill Morgan

‘We’ve fallen out of the habit of writing out our lives for one another, and instead we just pick up the phone.’

Kerouac/Ginsberg: The Letters

Allen Ginsberg & Jack Kerouac

‘Your isolation like mine is sad and frightful mainly the blind alleys of money and love but life is not over, and much to be written.’

Two Poems

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

‘It was a cruelty I first tried to blame on nature, / Then on growing up, on falling off, on it being / Just an old myth.’

Philippe Claudel | Interview

Philippe Claudel & Emily Greenhouse

‘The modern novel can’t sidestep or ignore the idea of evil on an industrial level’

First Story

William Fiennes

‘We talked a lot about voice – the idea that everyone has a voice, their own voice, and this is something to be valued and celebrated.’

What I’m Listening To: David Bowie

Wesley Stace

Wesley Stace on listening to every live recording of David Bowie. ‘He was always a step ahead.’

I & I: The Natural Mystics

Colin Grant

‘Such a spectacle could not have been envisaged ten years previously at the time of Bob Marley’s death from cancer.’

From our archive: Medtner

Philip Pullman

Our Music Season continues with writing from our archive by Philip Pullman. In this piece,...

What I’m Listening To

Adam Mars-Jones

‘Obscure repertoire is a sensible hiding-place for mediocre technique.’

The Pretty Women of Paris

Anonymous

‘For the last fifteen years she has been richly kept by a Russian prince, who revels in her brutality, viciousness, extravagance and love of brandy.’

Lunch with the Surgeon

Kapka Kassabova

‘Last month, a plastic surgeon in Buenos Aires tried to seduce me.’

The Unwriteable

Mark Doty

‘When I was seventeen, a freshman in college living in my parents’ house, I met Ruth at a poetry reading.’

The Redhead

Roberto Bolaño

‘Only the inventors survive.’

Undo it

Carl Phillips

‘I can almost see again: we’ll drown anyway’

Tokyo Island

Natsuo Kirino

‘The lottery to choose her next husband was to take place at the Imperial Palace.’

Rousseau and the Pussycat

Marie Darrieussecq

‘I am aware that according to present-­day criteria, the story I am about to tell contains several shocking scenes which fall within the realms of sexual harassment and cruelty towards animals.’

The Fig Tree and the Wasp

Brian Chikwava

‘The day I first saw the dance was the day we had expected to end with the execution of my maternal grandfather.’

Hang It Up

Anne Carson

‘hang up your blood cell phone mr white slaver’

My Queer War

James Lord

‘The ascent into oblivion was utter caesura of self.’

Zeppelin

Herta Müller

‘This Zeppelin may not float high and silver in the sky, but it does set your mind adrift.’

Bianca Burning

C.K. Williams

‘The sexual terror lions are roaring into my ears as I make my way between their cages’

Empty Porn Sets

Jo Broughton

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Four Mammals Contemplating Sex

Dave Eggers

Image 1 of 4 Bespectacled Bear, 12 January 2010, 4.51 p.m. Image 2 of 4...

Roseland

Rebecca Lenkiewicz

‘I’m twenty-­one. On a Greyhound bus going from New York to San Francisco.’

This is for You

Emmanuel Carrère

‘I have a proposition for you. From this moment on, you will do everything I tell you to do.’

Body

Yann Faucher

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Park Life

Rupert Thomson

‘As the weeks went by, I began to realize that the park had its own unofficial and carefully calibrated infrastructure.’

The Agony of Intimacy

Jeanette Winterson

‘We all knew that about the gods – that they were total sex.’

Translating Sex

Natasha Wimmer & Ollie Brock

‘I won’t say that the mood of a scene doesn’t affect me, but I’m not the translating equivalent of a Method actor.’

A Religious Conversation

Orhan Pamuk

‘"Hello, sir. Do you recognize me?" "No, I'm afraid I don't."’

Alive, Alive-Oh!

Diana Athill

‘She thought of herself as a rational woman, but while she could sleep alone in an empty house for night after night without worrying, there were other nights when her nerves twitched like a rabbit's at the least sound.’

Eight Pieces for the Left Hand

J. Robert Lennon

‘Autumn, once the most popular season in this town of tall trees, is now regarded with dread, thanks to the bitter athletic rivalry between our two local high schools.’

The Lives of Brian

Brian Cathcart

’ My name is Brian Cathcart. I grew up mainly in Northern Ireland. My father was headmaster of a secondary school and my mother taught English. I come from Protestant stock, though I have no religion myself. I studied history at university. I remember the Troubles starting, the war in Biafra, the Beatles.’

You Go When You Can No Longer Stay

Jackie Kay

‘It is not so much that we are splitting up that is really worrying me, it is the fact that she keeps quoting Martin Amis.’

The Surgery of Last Resort

Daniel Smith

’Early one morning in the fall of 1999, Steven R., a forty-seven-year-old man with fair skin and grey hair, was in the front yard of his home in suburban Nebraska, picking up leaves‘.