Granta | The Home of New Writing

My Angel

The Question of Fate

Catherine Lacey

‘The possibility that I’d unwittingly tapped into her fate and used it as fuel for a story sickened me.’

Zoraida

Tanya Rey

‘Desire was a slapping, bone-chilling wind the likes of which did not exist this close to the equator.’

Advice Column

Kazim Ali

‘Me always untorn and enslaved / Weird notions of gender and ground / Nothing but you between me and god.’

Five Things Right Now: Darcey Steinke

Darcey Steinke

Darcey Steinke, author of Sister Golden Hair, shares five links of what she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.

Sam Lipsyte and Diane Cook in Conversation

Diane Cook & Sam Lipsyte

‘The bewilderment was productive, and relit a good fire under my instinct, which I didn’t have to conflate with certainty.’

Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing

Yukiko Motoya

‘But the customer had already been in the changing room for three hours.’

Birdie

Ann DeWitt

‘By the end of the summer, the city was fed up with our antics.’

The Family Friend

Julia Franck

‘We’ve got a lot of family friends but Thorsten has been coming round far too often recently and I wonder whether I shouldn’t tell her that sometime.’

The Love Machine

Julia Elliott

‘Beatrice was my first love. The dark contours of her delicate skeleton, the glowing flesh made translucent by my X-ray gaze, drove me crazy.’

Citizen

Claudia Rankine

‘Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue’

Two Poems

Hoa Nguyen

‘I wrote ‘valley’ when I meant ‘longing’ / Your laugh a river A trout kind of green.’

Mona Simpson | First Sentence

Mona Simpson

‘A year later, still in third person, I’d taken five days off my character’s long wait. I’d moved to present tense, though, for more immediacy.’

Five Things Right Now: Sarah Thornton

Sarah Thornton

Sarah Thornton, author of 33 Artists, 3 Acts, shares five links of what she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.

Blood Is Usually Red

Katherine Faw Morris

‘A lot of babies were born in skiffs during storms, their umbilical cords cut with rusty pocketknives.’

Women’s Shadow in the American Western

Thirza Wakefield

‘The wild is no place for women—the film would seem to say.’

Melinda Moustakis | First Sentence

Melinda Moustakis

‘We all would like to think that with one line, one brush, we could make a reader fall madly in love, and there are writers that elicit such a response with the appropriately gorgeous.’

Etgar Keret | Interview

Etgar Keret & Sophie Lewis

‘Usually my wife makes fun of me.’

Jill

Darcey Steinke

‘I had a new persona I’d been planning to introduce the first day of school: a girl wise beyond her years who was not at all nerdy or spastic or prone to crying jags.’

Alan Warner | Five Things Right Now

Alan Warner

Granta Best Young British Novelist, Alan Warner, shares five things he’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.

Satanás

Olivia Clare

‘I dislike sleep, he told the girl, matches keep me awake.’

Introduction: American Wild

Sigrid Rausing

When I was seventeen, in 1980, I went on an American road trip with my...

Thing with Feathers that Perches in the Soul

Anthony Doerr

‘It has to be love, doesn’t it? In however many of its infinite permutations?’

Exotics

Callan Wink

‘He’d come to tell her that he was leaving. It seemed rather impossible now – the telling, not the leaving.’

River So Close

Melinda Moustakis

‘She’s a good-for-nothing chummer. If she survives a week on the slime line without cutting off her thumb or slicing her wrist, she’s hired.’

The Fighters

David Treuer

‘When he stepped into the cage he was doing battle with a disease. The disease was the feeling of powerlessness that takes hold of even the most powerful.’

A Confession

Jess Row

‘I walk out of the theatre in a daze. I’ve glimpsed something. But a glimpse, as it turns out, is not enough.’

Casta

Nicola Lo Calzo

An investigation of how historical racial factors shape memory, heritage and political and interpersonal relations in Louisiana and Mississippi.

A Meeting of Minds with Henry David Thoreau

Andrew Motion

‘What am I doing here more than looking – / which I would stop / only to help things through their vanishing’

Chasing Wolves in the American West

Adam Nicolson

‘It is the wildest part of the American South-West and, in a way, its most beautiful.’

Mitakuye Oyasin

Aaron Huey

‘Today the Oglala Lakota live in the shadow of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.’

Beyond Sunset

Mary Ruefle

‘Red sadness never appears sad . . . it appears in flashes of passion, anger, fear, inspiration and courage, in dark unsellable visions; it is an upside down penny concealed beneath a tea cosy.’

Grandma and Me

Thomas McGuane

‘Barring weather or a World Series game, on Sundays I’d pick up a nice little box lunch from Mustang Catering and take Grandma some place that smelled good.’

Krapp Hour

Anne Carson

‘Funny to end up here you may think, in this line of work, did I back into it, well more or less.’

The Mast Year

Diane Cook

‘Sounds like a mast year . . . it’s a thing that happens to trees. But sometimes it happens to people too.’

Mirage

Claire Vaye Watkins

‘He had a mind to surf through all crises and shortages and conflicts past and present.’

Holiday

Mona Simpson

‘‘I have a body now,’ I whisper.’