Granta | The Home of New Writing

The Redhead

The End of the Provinces

Jeremy Seabrook

‘If provincial life still exists, it does so only residually and is doomed to eventual extinction.’

Pounding a Nail

Studs Terkel

‘It wasn't his first radio interview—he'd done a few in New York the previous year—but certainly among his earliest.’

Motley Notes

Ian Jack

‘What was it like to work in such a place?’

Made in China

Isabel Hilton

‘Visiting a factory was one thing; working in one quite another.’

A Job on the Line

Desmond Barry

‘The atmosphere in the house was thick with my father's depression.’

Chocolate Empires

Andrew Martin

‘Q: When is a factory not a factory? A: When it’s a chocolate factory.’

Plastics

Luc Sante

‘I was fated to work in a factory.’

In the Milk Factory

Joe Sacco

'In October 2002 I travelled to the Russian Republic of Ingushetia to see how the people who had fled were faring.'

Fancy Lamps

Neil Steinberg

From the street, the factory housing the Frederick Cooper Lamp Company is not as ugly...

Lister’s Mill

Liz Jobey

‘The city has defied many plans for its regeneration and its centre is a dispiriting mess’

Buckets of Blood

Tessa Hadley

‘I’m miscarrying a pregnancy, she said, when the spasm seemed to have passed.—It’s a fine mess.’

Martin and Me

Thomas Healy

‘The Dobermann Club was run by a strong-voiced ex-army man who brooked no nonsense.’

The Muse in the Cellar

James Lasdun

‘It seems to me that at the age of thirteen, I had already developed the cynicism of a seventy-year-old dictator.’

The Game of Evenings

Adolf Hoffmeister & James Joyce

For Bloomsday, James Joyce and Adolf Hoffmeister argue about a Czech translation of Finnegans Wake in a rare and intimate interview from 1930.

Motley Notes

Ian Jack

‘The last issue of Granta celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary and retraced a little of its pre-1979 history as a magazine for and by the students of Cambridge University.’

The Lanes

John McGahern

‘The soil in Leitrim is poor, in places no more than an inch deep.’

The Merry Widow

Edmund White

’She met my father in Texas and then they moved north, where I was born in Cincinnati.‘

The Grief of Strangers

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

‘Chinechelum said little as her mother drove her to the airport.’

Never Neverland

Rodrigo Fresán

‘The dead are—always—masterpieces of literature.’

Lily

Ian McEwan

‘He'll be ruthless with himself in his pursuit of boundless health to avoid his mother's fate: Mental death.’

Mutations

Masha Gessen

‘With a disease as unpredictable as cancer, the opportunity to blame an actual person is an unexpected temptation.’

The Collector

Paul Maliszewski

‘Mitchell's writing is a blueprint for a New York which was then disappearing and is now almost lost.’

Mother of the Year

Paul Theroux

‘The words ‘big family’ have the same ring for me as 'savage tribe', and I now know that every big family is savage in its own way.’

Notes from the Land of Nod

Jim Lewis

‘You can drink in a bar and sober up in the basement of a church, but everyone sleeps (or lies awake) in solitude.’

How to Stop Your Mother-in-Law from Drowning

Richard Beard

‘This is one of those stories about she and you. She is the mother-in-law. You are the man who duped her daughter, or the woman who ensnared her son.’

When There is Talk of 1945

Ryszard Kapuscinski

‘All through the war I dream of shoes.’

Motley Notes

Ian Jack

Ian Jack’s introduction to Granta 87: Jubilee.

Benjamin Pell Versus the Rest of the World

Tim Adams

‘You hear Benjamin Pell long before you see him.’

Northanger Abbey

Martin Amis

Jane Austen’s novel ‘Northanger Abbey’ was published posthumously in 1818. Martin Amis adapted it for Miramax Pictures in 2001. The film has yet to be made. This is how it begins.

Bang!

James Hamilton-Paterson

‘My daydreams were full of explosions.’

Early One Morning

Helen Simpson

‘He's the only person in the world who listens to me and does what I tell him (thought Zoe).’

Perchance to Pick One’s Nose

Jan Morris

‘Shame and regret are certainly not the same things: je ne regrette rien, like charity, can cover a multitude of sins.’

Never Againism

Philip Gourevitch

‘Anniversaries can have an importance—a power over us—that we do not control.’

A New World

V. S. Pritchett

‘What was this new world? It was their love for each other.’

The View from Yves Hill

William Boyd

‘What is the point of rising early? I congratulate myself if I'm out of bed before midday.’

Aspirers

Pankaj Mishra

‘Bollywood is part of what our culture has become. We are lying to ourselves all the time.’