Bye-Bye Natalia
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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.’
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.‘
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.’
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.’
The Congo Dinosaur
Redmond O’Hanlon
‘The boy lay stretched out on a low wooden platform under an orange tree.’
The Pathology Lesson
Michael Dibdin
‘The autopsy is complete. I thank the pathologist, who thanks me for coming. We both thank the assistant, who in turn thanks us. It is all very polite, very English. You almost expect the cadavers to add their thanks as well.’
Spring Break at Daytona Beach
Mary Ellen Mark
Mary Ellen Mark’s photographs of spring break at Daytona Beach in Granta 39: The Body.
The Cells, Tissues, Systems and Cavities of the Body
Jeanette Winterson
‘You were a coat of many colours wrestled into the dirt.’
My Mother’s Eyes
Todd McEwen
‘My mother has a small brown book, the kind of notebook made of alligators and sold to wealthy people who do not make notes.’
Teeth
Giorgio Pressburger
‘One day in January a tall thin man with long white hair came into our courtyard. He was draped in a green cloak, torn in various places.’
Wild Women, Wild Men
Hanif Kureishi
‘When I saw them waiting beside their car, I said, ‘You must be freezing.’ It was cold and foggy, the first night of winter, and the two women had matching short skirts and skimpy tops; their legs were bare.’
Sideshow
Antonin Kratochvil
Antonin Kratochvil’s photographs of sideshow performers for Granta 39: The Body.
Red Fire Farm
Anchee Min
‘I arrived at Red Fire Farm – along with many other girls in ten large trucks – late one spring afternoon in 1974.’
The Internment
John Conroy
‘In a low-rent corner of Belfast's city centre is a district known as Smithfield, and on its main street there is a market, an anarchist bookshop, a public toilet and a bookmaker's called Stanley’s.’
