The Last Rite of the Body
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William Atkins In Conversation
William Atkins & Luke Neima
William Atkins in conversation about his new book, The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places.
Two Poems
Kristín Ómarsdóttir
‘cut a piece from a lip and put in a secret place’ – New poetry translated from the Icelandic by Vala Thorodds.
The Man Who Lived
Snigdha Poonam
Snigdha Poonam on how WhatsApp is being used to encourage mob violence in India.
Louise Bourgeois as I Knew Her
Jean Frémon
‘The portrait is built up of tiny strokes, one added upon another, like dashes of pencil.’ Translated from the French by Cole Swensen.
West
Carys Davies
Carys Davies' new novel is a mesmerising depiction of the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River
Amy Bloom | Five Things Right Now
Amy Bloom
Amy Bloom shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.
Fathers and Sons
Benjamin Markovits
‘For a while it wasn’t clear how good he would become, and then it was. He went up the rankings, stopped, and started going down.’
Acts of Infidelity
Lena Andersson
‘Anticipation made it difficult for Ester to swallow.’ Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel.
Four Syrian Borders: A Motorcycle Journey, 2007
Esa Aldegheri & Gavin Francis
‘The landscape, glimpsed through plumes of dust thrown up by trucks, grew drier, more hostile as it climbed away from the sea.’
Oh, the Obvious
Christine Schutt
‘A wizened spring, the sickly prickly pear and organ pipe cacti were so riddled with holes they might have been targets.’
The Duchess of Albany
Christine Schutt
‘The permanence of his absence is a noise she hears when she listens to how quiet.’
Days of Awe
A.M. Homes
Read the title story from AM Homes' dazzling new collection of short stories, Days of Awe, available now from Granta Books.
Mother’s Death
Stephen Sharp
‘Last year father attacked me as a “wet radish”. This caused me to give up writing diary entries.’
Snow Job
Brian Allen Carr
‘I like to think the ones who are worst at coloring will remember me the longest.’
Song of the Andoumboulou: 212
Nathaniel Mackey
—brother b’s roman sojourn— Brother B gathered his locks, bound them with a...
Palmyra
Charles Glass & Don McCullin
‘ISIS’s second conquest of Palmyra astonished everyone, and fed the belief in a Syrian government conspiracy to assist ISIS.’
Lake Like a Mirror
Ho Sok Fong
‘If she’d swerved any harder, she would have crashed right into the lake.’ New fiction by Ho Sok Fong, translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce.
New Town Blues
Jason Cowley & Gus Palmer
‘They had believed they were coming to a new town. But, they said, Harlow wasn’t new: it looked old.’
Renderings
Edward Burtynsky & Anthony Doerr
‘Often when I stare into the alien circuitry of a Burtynsky picture, it takes me a while to figure out what has actually been photographed.’ Anthony Doerr introduces Edward Burtynsky’s photographs.
The Last Shopkeepers of London
David Flusfeder
‘It became a kind of mission to find contemporaries of theirs that weren’t closing down, establishments that have continued to flourish, or at least endure.’
Darling
Chelsey Minnis
‘It’s dangerous like a very powerful doorbell. / Or a portrait covered with a blanket.’
The Perseids
Susan Straight
‘The time of the Perseids never varied. That was why Dante’s mother had taught him the stars.’
Root and Branch
Sana Valiulina
‘I am my father’s daughter, a former prisoner of war and “suspicious person” who spent ten years in the Gulag.’ Translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon.
Mall Camp, Seasons 1 & 2
Joshua Cohen
‘He was thirteen years old or just about and newly an only child. Newly not a child.’
Karl Kraus and Veza
Elias Canetti
‘It was natural that the rumors about both these people should reach me at the same time; they came from the same source, from which everything new for me came at that time.’
Five Skeins
Sarah V. Schweig
‘In my crumbling country every day, / people spend their lives standing in lines / to buy designer sneakers.’
The Editor’s Chair: On Svetlana Alexievich
Jacques Testard
‘It is clear when reading Svetlana Alexievich that she has a deep empathy for the characters whose stories she tells.’
Three Stories
Andrés Ibáñez
‘The rabbits are gentle and timid – in fact, they behave as rabbits normally do – but nonetheless their size is troubling.’
Carys Davies | Notes on Craft
Carys Davies
‘All good stories are both resonant and concrete; they live in the mind of the reader and reverberate beyond the pages of the book.’
Painter to the King
Amy Sackville
This is an excerpt from Painter to the King, Amy Sackville's account of the life of Diego Velázquez. Now available from Granta Books.
The Leech Barometer
Rebecca Giggs
‘To be consumed by leeches is to be vital, to be animate, though it is also to be reminded you are something else’s prey, and therefore porous and mortal.’
Rosses Point
John Connell
‘I’m going to die out here he thought, I’m going to die trying to save this beast in front of my boy.’