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O Tannenbaum

Blind Rage

Henry John Reid

‘I was born in Dundee on 3 April 1951, of a mother who was not meant to bear more children and a father who had long before disappeared.’

Glasgow Victim

Hugh Barnes

‘I went to Glasgow to live out a fantasy. Its fluid, inconstant, nerve-wrung landscape had a claim upon my imagination.’

Crime in the City

Andrew Savulich

Andrew Savulich’s photographs of crime in New York City for Granta 46: Crime.

The Penitenitary

Tim Willocks

‘A million man-years of confinement had burnished the surface of the granite flags to a greasy smoothness ingrained deeply with filth and despair.’

Local Man has Sex with Corpse

Allan Gurganus

‘RALEIGH–A former funeral home employee charged with having sex with a body he was transporting pleaded guilty Wednesday after a psychiatrist testified that the man had sexual problems and that the incident probably was an isolated one.’

Foreign Bodies

Peregrine Hodson

‘We'd reached the end of the journey: a day and a night and then home. Perhaps that was our first mistake. We forgot where we were.’

Dizzy

Paul Auster

‘The method’s not important. The only thing that counts is that you go along with it – and that you understand why it has to be done.’

Fiction by Paul Auster.

The Getaway Lunch

Tibor Fischer

‘I found a seedy hotel not far from the station, where you would expect to find one.’

The Black Sheep

Italo Calvino

‘And then one day – nobody knows how – an honest man appeared.’

Fiction by Italo Calvino

Newcastle

Ian Hamilton

‘My first sighting of Paul Gascoigne was in 1987, when he was playing for Newcastle.’

Tottenham

Ian Hamilton

‘Gascoigne’s move to Tottenham had made him rich.’

World Cup Hero

Ian Hamilton

‘The antitheses had been there all along but in July 1990, after Gascoigne’s World Cup triumph, they were given a new formulation.’

Don’t Cry for Gazza

Ian Hamilton

‘‘Who is Gazza?’ asked Mr Justice Harman in the High Court in September 1990.’

Actively Portly

Ian Hamilton

‘When Ian Rush was asked to explain his failure to score goals for Juventus he replied that being in Italy was like being in a foreign country.’

Finally Fit

Ian Hamilton

‘By eight-thirty, the rain was sheeting down, and the thunder and lightning seemed to be directly overhead. The police dogs around the track began to bark. Were lions whelping in the street? Had Gazza been too saucy with the gods?’

Il Commento Gastrico

Ian Hamilton

‘In the old days, when a British star went to Italy, he disappeared.’

Portly Again?

Ian Hamilton

‘English football’s most precocious and precious talent is evaporating into the skies over Italy like the fading flares of a half-spent Roman candle.’

Mississippi Water

Jonathan Raban

‘I flew to Minneapolis, rented a car and followed the river downstream for a thousand miles.’

Batorsag and Szerelem

Ethan Canin

‘In January of 1973, the year everything changed in our family, my older brother Clive competed for the mathematics championship of William Howard Taft High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio.’

Fourteen and After

Nick Hornby

‘We were fourteen and had recently discovered irony.’

The Visit

Timothy Garton Ash

‘His language is a little stiff, polit-bureaucratic, but very far from being just ideological gobbledygook. Through it come glimpses of a real political intelligence, a man who knows about power.’

The Highway of Brotherhood and Unity

Michael Ignatieff

‘Back in 1989, we thought the new world opened up by the breaching of the Berlin Wall would be ruled by philosopher kings, dissident heroes and shipyard electricians.’

World War One Veterans

Steve Pyke

Steve Pyke’s portraits of World War One veterans for Granta 45: Gazza Agonistes.

The Last Place on Earth

Tracy Kidder

‘The living-room windows begin to reflect the lights on the plastic Christmas tree, and the view through those windows is fading, the woods growing thicker, the birches glowing in the dusk.’

Grandma Moore’s Cancer

Mary Karr

‘Those are only rumours of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. And it knows your name.’

The Bank Manager

Charles Glass

‘In the south of France, at the edge of a cove that cannot be reached by road, lives an old woman from England.’

Little America

T. Coraghessan Boyle

‘All he wanted was a quarter, fifty cents, a dollar maybe. The guy was a soft touch, absolutely–the softest.’

L,U,C,I,E

Nadine Gordimer

‘I correct the spelling because I’m a lawyer and I’m accustomed to precision in language; in legal documents the displacement of a comma can change the intention expressed in a sentence and lead to new litigation.’

Pictures from the War

Thomas Kern

‘Kern’s achievement is to have captured this despair, and the confusion of ordinary people forced to live and love and die in the middle of a battlefield.’

Dancing in Cambodia

Amitav Ghosh

‘The only person I ever met who knew both Princess Soumphady and King Sisowath was a dancer named Chea Samy. She was said to be one of the Cambodia’s greatest dancers, a national treasure. She was also Pol Pot’s sister-in-law.’

Memorial

Tobias Wolff

‘B.D. carried certain objects.’

A Childhood in Terezin

Ivan Klíma

‘I am trying to reach, in memory, a time before the war began.’

Chatwin Revisited

Paul Theroux

‘He was such a darter he seldom stayed still long enough for anyone to sum him up.’

The Road to Ouidah

Bruce Chatwin

‘Sweat, fruit, dust. The stunted goats. On the beach the straight line of white breakers, a pale blue sea, the colour almost of the sky. The bleached hulls of the pirogues. The blown coconut palms.’

The Red Notebook

Paul Auster

‘In 1973 I was offered a job as caretaker of a farmhouse in the south of France.’

Memoir by Paul Auster.

Under Ice

Iain Banks

‘Andy runs out across the ice.‘