Granta | The Home of New Writing

Resolution

Buchenwald

Ian Buruma

‘Once upon a time, on top of a green hill, high above the red roofs of Weimar, there was an oak tree.’

Love in Germany

Doris Dörrie

‘Does a married couple have to be faithful?’

Losses

Günter Grass

‘In the summer, my wife and I visited the small Danish island of Møn.’

Berlin by Night

Ed Kashi

Ed Kashi’s photographs of nightlife in Berlin for Granta 42: Krauts!

Zonophobia

Monika Maron

‘Having expressed my unfair fury, I feel a need for balance.’

Halle by Day

Hans Joachim Ellerbrock

‘Partly as a result of emissions from these plants, but more particularly because brown coal is burnt in private houses, Halle has the highest level of air pollution in Germany.’

The Stone-Thrower from Eisenhuttenstadt

Max Thomas Mehr & Regine Sylvester

‘It has nothing to do with the question of the foreigners. No one in Eisenhuttenstadt wants the foreigners here.’

A Hippy Among Communists

Klaus Schlesinger

‘In March 1975, thirty years after the collapse of German fascism, N., a student from Berlin – bearded and long-haired – attended a series of lectures at a university on the Baltic coast.’

Shaking Hands with the Zeitgeist

Wolf Biermann

‘He was, after all, more than a mere hiccup in the history of the world.’

The Devil’s Kitchen

Russell Hoban

‘I'll now describe this artefact as precisely as I can because I want to make it perfectly clear that when I bought it there was no reason for me to think that it was anything more than what it appeared to be.’

The Table

Pawel Huelle

‘‘Oh, that table!’ my mother would shriek, ‘I just can't stand it a moment longer! Other people have decent furniture.’’

Lederhosen

Haruki Murakami

‘Please, I beg you. If I do not buy lederhosen now, I will never buy lederhosen.’

Ohne Mich: Why I Shall Never Return To Germany

Martha Gellhorn

‘Nothing would have brought me back except that I worried about the European Community whose full flowering I will surely not live to see but I invest my faith in it.’

Baghdad Diary

Nuha al-Radi

‘Other countries do wrong: look what Russia did in Afghanistan, or Turkey invading Cyprus, or Israel taking over Palestine and Lebanon. Nobody bombed them senseless. They were not even punished. Perhaps we have too much history.’

Zagreb

Dubravka Ugrešić

‘‘We’ll print your book if you bring us 140 kilos of paper,’ says my friend, a publisher. ‘Where can I find 140 kilos of paper?’ ‘I don’t know. That’s your problem, you’re the writer.’’

Dobrinja

Nedžad lbrišimović

‘The whole idea is that Adem is going to prevent the crimes that have already occurred.’

Memoirs of a Bootlegger’s Son

Saul Bellow

‘Pa was a mercurial man, and very unlucky.’

Starting Out in Chicago

James Atlas

‘Dangling Man was his M.A., Bellow liked to say; The Victim was his Ph.D.‘

When Did You Last See Your Father?

Blake Morrison

‘When did you last see your father? Was it when they burned the coffin? Put the lid on it? When he exhaled his last breath? When he last sat up and said something? When he last recognized me? When he last smiled? When he last did something for himself unaided?‘

A very young Dancer

Todd McEwen

‘I have a snapshot of the two of us: late on a summer afternoon we're playing in an inflatable wading pool.‘

The Names of Women

Louise Erdrich

‘Ikwe is the word for woman in the language of the Anishinabe, my mother's people, whose descendants, mixed with and married to French trappers and farmers, are the Michifs of the Turtle Mountain reservation in North Dakota.‘

The Contents of Pockets

Luc Sante

‘Time in its passing casts off particles of itself in the form of images, documents, relics, junk.‘

Breaking In

Andrew Motion

‘He dedicated The Less Deceived to her: it was the only collection of poems he dedicated to anyone.‘

Among the Tulips

Richard Holmes

‘When young James Boswell arrived in Holland in August 1763 at the age of twenty-two, his first impulse was to commit suicide.‘

A Colossal Hoard

Ian Hamilton

‘For James Boswell, admiration was a busy, intimate affair.’

Life and Art

John Banville

‘He arrived in Paris for the first time huddled on a hay cart.’

Death of the Author

Lorna Sage

‘Her genius for estrangement came out of a thin-skinned extremity of response to the circumstances of her life and to the signs of the times.’

The Womanizer

Richard Ford

‘Austin turned up the tiny street – rue Sarrazin – at the head of which he hoped he would come to a larger one, one he knew, rue de Vaugirard, possibly, which he could take all the way to Josephine Belliard's apartment by the Luxembourg Gardens.’

Lady Max

Paul Theroux

‘You didn't become a Londoner simply by living there. After seven years I was still an alien.’

An Afghanistan Picture Show

William T. Vollmann

‘The windbreakers of the passengers standing at the rail fluttered violently.’

Einstein in Bern

Alan Lightman

‘Einstein and Besso walk slowly down Speichergasse in the late afternoon.’

Afrikaners and the Future

André Brink

‘What is the future of Afrikaners in South Africa?’

Die Hel

David Goldblatt

‘Die Hel is a remote valley in the Swartburg Mountains of the south-western Cape.’

Look-Alikes

Nadine Gordimer

‘It was scarcely worth noticing at first; an out-of-work lying under one of the rare indigenous shrubs cultivated by the Botany Department on the campus.’

The Mississippi Delta

Ken Light

‘In the last three years I have driven along some of the smaller, less-travelled roads of the Mississippi Delta.’

Los Angeles

Richard Rayner

‘Los Angeles was a lot like South Africa. The apartheid wasn't enshrined by law, but by economics and geography, and it was just as powerful.’