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Craig Taylor
‘Akenfield did not bow to sentimental ideas of the countryside as idyll’
The Seventh Event
Richard Powers
‘Think of mitosis as trillions of slightly near-sighted, plagiarizing students’
Waiting for Salmon
Barry Lopez
‘The world, we too often forget, has no investment or interest in the triumph of Homo sapiens’
Airds Moss
Kathleen Jamie
‘It could almost have been Neolithic, an ancient and mysterious earthworks.’
Fantastic Mr Fox
Tim Adams
‘He told the police officer that he was a vegan and the next morning a little slit in the prison door opened, with his breakfast: a metal tray on which there were three frozen potatoes.’
Tim Adams on the fox hunting ban in Granta 90: Country Life.
When Grandmama Was Young
Matthew Reisz
‘They touched on some of the crucial questions about sex we are still struggling with.’
The Death of a Chair
Doris Lessing
‘To attack the chair I equipped myself with a saw, sharp scissors and a claw hammer.’
Constitutional
Helen Simpson
‘The thing about a circular walk is that you end up where you started.’
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.’
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.’
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 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.’
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.’
