David Jégou & Andrew Hussey

‘What I like most is that the staff are all card-carrying Communists – very militant and all passionate about what they are doing.’

Brad Watson

‘Before I moved to Wyoming in 2005, I was – like a lot of people outside this region, it turns out – not quite sure just where it was.’

Brad Watson & Patrick Ryan

‘This story did emerge from the single image of the mother, angry, vacuuming while her three boys watched television, a little dumbfounded and afraid. That’s a memory from my childhood that’s always stuck with me.’

Rodrigo Fresán

‘There’s never enough money to buy all the books we need to read or simply admire, hold, caress, knowing that we have them, that they’re ours.’

Non-fiction by Rodrigo Fresán, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.

Ceridwen Dovey

‘‘Have you always worked hard in your life?’ I asked Drieka on the first day I filmed her.’

Ruchir Joshi

‘They examine roads the way I imagine wine-tasters assess a new vintage or a strange grape.’

Marc Pastor & Lilian Neuman

‘When I was younger I wanted to be a detective, a clown and a writer, in that order.’

Claudia Alva

Claudia Alva’s photographs of an investigation of book piracy in Peru.

Orhan Pamuk & John Freeman

‘Orhan Pamuk speaks to Granta editor John Freeman about his latest book, The Museum of Innocence.’

Daniel Alarcón

‘Being pirated is the Peruvian equivalent of making the bestseller list.’

Donald Ray Pollock

‘I began working at the Mead Paper Company in Chillicothe, Ohio, in the summer of 1973.’

Steven Hall

‘The robot is the Godot of practical science.’

Derek Walcott

‘I came up out of the subway and there were / people standing on the steps as if they knew / something I didn’t.’

Colum McCann

‘Dublin in the mid­-1970s. Nine years old.’

Julian Barnes

‘They had dined well at no. 261 Landstrasse, and now passed eagerly into the music room.’

Brad Watson

‘The mother told the boys that she was much unappreciated in this house.’

Jim Crace

‘Leonard Lessing does not dream of Maxie Lemon, Maxim Lermontov, the hostage­-taker.’

Martin Kimani

‘Work is so common that it is rendered invisible.’

Peter Stothard

‘Essex clay could be like living flesh or a cold dead wall.’

V. V. Ganeshananthan

‘Pain informs. Pain draws a map. Doctors resolve to relieve pain, but pain is information, and to lose it is to lose something valuable.’

Joshua Ferris

‘Coffee and a powdered doughnut sat on his desk, the morning offering.’

Daniel Alarcón & John Freeman

‘Granta editor John Freeman interviews Daniel Alarcón about book piracy in Peru.’

Ruchir Joshi

‘The day after my visit to the silica factories in Godhra, I am taken to meet three dead men.’

Aminatta Forna

‘Jalloh likes to keep accurate records of such things. After all, nobody else does.’

Granta’s Deputy Editor Ellah Allfrey interviewed author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o at New Beacon Books about his childhood in rural Kenya and his piece in the new Granta - an extract of upcoming memoir Dreams in a Time of War.

Steven Greenhouse

‘To them, the emphasis was on the ‘creative’ part of creative destruction. But in Janesville, few could see beyond the destruction.’

Nicola Monaghan

‘It was the middle of summer and a group of us were out on the town in Nottingham City Centre.’

Ruchir Joshi

‘The funnel is clearly dormant, but the dust is alive, rising up even as it closes in around us.’

Antonio Oliveira Ruvenal & Isa Pessoa

‘You figure you don’t want to repeat history, that it will be different with your children, not like your parents, but I think I’m doing just the same thing.’

Aleksandar Hemon

‘I came to this fine country from Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the winter of 1992, a couple of months before the war started.’

Stuart Dybek

‘In memory, Lake Shore Drive is empty, barred to traffic, as if awaiting a tsunami.’

Alex Kotlowitz

‘Early one morning in July 2003 I was woken by a phone call from a young man who I’d known since he was twelve.’

Don DeLillo

‘This part of the island lacked electricity.’