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.’

Elaine Showalter

‘Addams was hailed as ‘the only saint America has produced’, and a female saint to boot.’

Wole Soyinka

‘It is not a complete man now dominating the affairs of the world from a historic mansion appropriately named the White House, although a case can be made that he comes close enough.’

Tony D’Souza

‘This is why you don’t go to the West Side, I told myself.’

George Saunders

‘On a clear night you could see Chicago.’

Bei Dao

‘When I first came to America in the autumn of 1988, I met the Zhou brothers in Chicago.’

Dinaw Mengestu

‘In a city as sprawling and as proud of its architectural grandeur as Chicago, such an emphasis on size seemed only fitting.’

Camilo José Vergara

‘Chicago was the first large American city I visited after I came to the United States from my home country, Chile.’

Richard Powers

‘You’ll have heard how the city once ended in fire’

Maria Venegas

‘Maybe you should consider moving’

Rich Cohen

‘When everyone was asleep, we put on our boots and waded out into the drifts of Glencoe – a suburban street remade into an eerie winter-scape.’