Granta | The Home of New Writing

In Shinjuku

Julie Klam | Interview

Julie Klam & Marian Brown

‘I’m successful? I can’t wait to call my mother!’

Elegy

Sean O’Brien

‘It seems there's no such thing as history. / We must have dreamed the world you've vanished from.’

Reconstruction | New Voices

Lana Asfour

‘There’s nothing like watching the summer sunset with a glass of jellab.’

Helen Gordon | What I’m Reading

Helen Gordon

Helen Gordon on three books she’s reading.

Something Close to Heaven

Evie Wyld

‘It was just past nine when the fuel ran out.’

Evie Wyld | Interview

Evie Wyld & Roy Robins

‘When I was at school I found I received the same satisfaction from writing a short story that I did doing awful self-portraits – only the results were much better.’

Charlotte Roche | Interview

Charlotte Roche & Philip Oltermann

‘I love that image. Me flying over Germany, throwing sex bombs into people’s minds.’

Rosalind Porter | What I’m Reading

Rosalind Porter

‘Despite the difficulties booksellers have selling the stuff, the short story isn’t going to disappear anytime soon.’

Wonder Why

Karan Mahajan

‘‘I personally could not tell what exhibits were fake and which were real,’ he wrote. ‘Why would the curators want to create this confusion and mock our very senses?’’

The Exploding Planet of Junot Díaz

Evelyn Ch’ien

‘The world tends to give us pieces, and then in our imagination, because of our desire and because of our need, we make them whole.’

An Open Letter to Mbeki

Petina Gappah

‘You are human, Mr Mbeki, and are therefore prey to the resentments and obstinacies that plague the mere mortal.’

Sign of the Gun

P. D. Mallamo

‘You are going to be lonely for a while, he says to himself at six p.m. on a Thursday and orbits the field three times before dropping in like he’s crashing, just beyond the edge of the canyon.’

Simon Willis | What I’m Reading

Simon Willis

‘Like an excitable child, I rushed to the foyer to buy my copy.’

Gordon Burn | Interview

Gordon Burn & Simon Willis

‘The line between reality and its representation has become rivetingly porous.’

P.D. Mallamo | Interview

P. D. Mallamo & Roy Robins

‘Writing and reading in third-person present is like a high-speed drive through Nevada at two a.m.: incredibly invigorating and somewhat dangerous.’

Opinion: Kenya

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

‘Where Kenyatta had imprisoned me for my writing, Moi sent three truckloads of armed policemen to raze to the ground the community theatre where I worked.’

Tim Lott | Interview

Tim Lott & Helen Gordon

‘Somehow by putting things into words you’re taking a situation that feels very out of control and creating a kind of illusion of control over it.’

Musa Qala, Afghanistan | Dispatches

James Holland

‘As I discovered, many Afghans still believe that the Taliban offers security.’

Photography: The Paris Intifada

Nick Danziger

Nick Danziger’s photographs of the troubled Paris suburb of Bagneux.

Jason Cowley | What I’m Reading

Jason Cowley

‘Music, because of its abstraction, is the most difficult of all art forms to write about with exactitude and precision.’

Photography: Svarlbard

Gautier Deblonde

A selection of photographs from the Arctic archipelago Svarlbard.

The Disappearing Beach

Akash Kapur

Akash Kapur on ecological catastrophe in southern India.

One Hundred: Introduction

William Boyd

Granta 100: One Hundred’s guest-editor on the challenge of putting together a milestone issue.

Solly and Lark

Jayne Anne Phillips

‘If he got inside me I would never get away.’

Poem
(To A)

Harold Pinter

‘I shall miss you so much when I am dead’

On Buying a Clavichord

James Fenton

‘Your clavichord breathes as sweetly as your heart.’

Something to Tell You

Hanif Kureishi

‘I’d have dumped her if it wouldn’t have caused more problems than it solved.’

Three Character Sketches

Mario Vargas Llosa

‘For Fataumata, and others like her, dying tragically is dying naturally.’

From the Flood Plain

Jamie McKendrick

‘No flood as parched as this’

Après

Jamie McKendrick

‘greener / for an alien crop of hogweed higher / than us’

In-flight Entertainment

Helen Simpson

‘All you needed for the modern world was to know how to work a remote control.’

Eel Tail

Alice Oswald

‘untranslatable hissed interruptions / unspeakable wide chapped lips’

The Unknown Known

Martin Amis

A satire on fundamentalism in this extract from an unpublished manuscript.

Human Safari

Lucy Eyre

‘We can visit them but they can’t visit us.’

Highlights

Alan Hollinghurst

‘Surely we’re not going to Rome for discos.’

Chickens and Eggs

Doris Lessing

‘Twenty-one days it takes to hatch eggs, twenty-one nights, and there sits the great fierce hen who had accepted me as protector and jailer for that time.’