A Lovely and Terrible Thing
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Uncle Ed
Keith Fleming
‘Back in 1976 when I was sixteen, my uncle, the novelist Edmund White, rescued me from the messy aftermath of my parents' divorce and brought me to live with him in New York’.
Gifted
Richard Williams
‘The interim report filed by the investigator from the coroner's bureau listed him as a black male, 5ft 7in tall, weighing 1351b‘.
The Furnace
Lydia Davis
‘My father has trouble with his hearing and does not like to talk on the phone, so I talk on the phone mainly to my mother’.
Closer
David Malouf
‘There was a time, not so long ago, when we saw my Uncle Charles twice each year, at Easter and Christmas’.
Asking for it
James Hamilton-Paterson
‘Having my hair cut one morning in February 1999, I fell foul of one of those barber-shop discussions which are a feature of life here in Italy’.
Are We Related?
Linda Grant
My mother and I are going shopping, as we have done all our lives. ‘Now...
Into the Wind
N. A. M. Rodger
In the days of Francis Drake, the Armada and Queen Elizabeth’s war with Spain, the...
Trawling for Facts
Will Hobson
Less than one-hundredth of a per cent of the deep sea has been glimpsed; astronauts...
Snapper On Board
William Scammell
The Cunard’s Queens, the Mary and Elizabeth, each carried two thousand passengers and almost as...
Sea-Towers
Bella Bathurst
The lighthouse is petrified in affectionate memory. Its image has been used so often–by charities,...
The Case For Butterfish
Neal Ascherson
The ship had left the port of Varna in Bulgaria, the passengers had dined and...
9999
John Barth
The word odometer dates from 1791, but mileage indicators didn’t appear as standard equipment on...
Martha Gellhorn
Nicholas Shakespeare
‘What clipped the wings of her fiction and grounded her imagination was precisely what made her soar as a journalist.’
Ruchir Joshi | Interview
Ruchir Joshi
Writer and filmmaker Ruchir Joshi on his essay ‘Tracing Puppa’, Calcutta and his dreams of writing for Granta.
The Attacks in Mumbai
Rana Dasgupta
‘India is a garrulous place, and yet, during last week’s attacks in Mumbai, it became speechless.’
Daniel Alarcón | Interview
Daniel Alarcón & Helen Gordon
‘The strangest parts of a story are not necessarily the fictional elements.’
Subject+Object: The fount of all smoky wisdom
Will Self
‘To explain what I now feel for the pipe I must paraphrase the writer Robert Stone’s remarks on hard drugs: I admire it from afar.’
Olga Grushin | Portrait of My Father
Olga Grushin
‘Things that aren’t done right away are never done.’
Doing the Paperwork: Life in the aftermath of a violent death
David Goldblatt
‘If the pressure of their life didn’t kill her it made the fight too hard.’
Portrait of My Father
Ali Smith
‘What you do is, you go up to it, and touch it.’
Ali Smith remembers her father.
Caterpillars
James Lasdun
‘But he had engulfed her somehow; taken up residence in her imagination like some large, dense, intractable problem that had been given to her to solve.’
Provide, Provide
Daniyal Mueenuddin
‘You buy me things and then later you’ll think you bought me. I was never for sale.’
Portrait of My Father
Adam Mars-Jones
‘I put my trophy on a high shelf, and at some stage laid it face down.’
Tracing Puppa
Ruchir Joshi
‘Also, at core, he was a theatre man, an actor, and he had the confidence of the genuine performer – ‘life makes you go through many roles and you have to act them with style!’’
In My Father’s Footsteps
Francesca Segal
‘The two monoliths that dominated my father’s identity – the peak and the trough of his life – were Love Story and Parkinson’s disease.’
