Granta | The Home of New Writing

The Liar

Pig Skin

Andrés Felipe Solano

‘A perfect impostor.’

Printable

Toh EnJoe

‘Which is scarier: that the past could actually change or that you could just think it did?’

After the War, Before the War

David Peace

‘At last, at last. His first steps, on Chinese soil.’

From Site

Daisuke Yokota

‘The photograph we are left with and the memory of that time do not progress along the same time axes.’

Scavengers

Adam Johnson

‘I was dying to buy something, anything that would help my wife and children understand the profound surrealism and warped reality I’d experienced on my research trip to North Korea.’

The Dogs

Yukiko Motoya

‘I once lived with a whole lot of dogs.’

Arrival Gates

Rebecca Solnit

‘It was like trying to go back to before the earthquake, to before knowledge.’

Pink

Tomoyuki Hoshino

‘Spinning makes all that is illusory fall away.’ Translated from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom.

Maruti 800

Rana Dasgupta

‘Like a tiny old woman surrounded by strapping grandsons, the Maruti 800 was in fact the progenitor of all that new, muscular, vehicular variety.’

O-bakanaru

Eric Ozawa

‘When your wife walks away from you, she does not disappear. When you turn your back, she does not vanish. She will be there when you open your eyes.’

Heart and Soul in Every Stitch

Tash Aw

‘Where wealth and technology go, culture quickly follows, and soon it became acceptable, even desirable, to express an interest in Japan beyond the mere practicality offered by its products.’

Hush . . . Hush Sweet Charlotte

Kazushige Abe

‘The crucial thing was to cool the baby off, bring the fever down.’

Two Poems

Kimiko Hahn

‘Certainly the tide or the dog striding along the sluff of seaweed, / this afternoon – brown, light green, black green, white and red.’

Japan Lights

Sarah Moss

‘She kneels and bows her head almost to the floor, as if pretending he’s one of her idols.’

Five Things Right Now: Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation, shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about.

Eight Trains

Alberto Olmos

‘To go is always to go somewhere; returning, you return to nowhere. That’s the way it is.’

Bakamonotako

Brenda Shaughnessy

‘Bakamonotako felt she didn’t need all eight of her appendages. Four would do.’

Ruth Ozeki | Podcast

Ruth Ozeki & Yuka Igarashi

‘And I never was quite sure who I was or who I was supposed to be.’

Granta Finland | Interview

Aleksi Pöyry & Francisco Vilhena

‘What is often particular to Finnish Weird is that it portrays a realistic, palpable setting which gradually starts to acquire elements of fantasy.’

In the Light of What We Know

Zia Haider Rahman

‘My wife and I were both the children of Pakistanis, immigrants, Muslims, and we had faith that our union was of things greater than ourselves.’

Brigitte Grignet | Interview

Brigitte Grignet & Daniela Silva

‘Places sitting at the edges of the world are often destroyed in the name of so-called development.’

Eyes That Have Seen the Sea

Tomás González

‘He had just finished unpacking his rucksack, new only ten days ago and now a sodden, salty, decomposing rag, when they called him.’

Mark Gevisser and Jonny Steinberg | Podcast

Mark Gevisser & Jonny Steinberg

Mark Gevisser and Jonny Steinberg discuss recent South African history, their personal relationship to Johannesburg, and their personal relationship to a divided city.

Lauren Holmes | Interview

Lauren Holmes & Louise Scothern

‘Even if you move to the other side of the world, and even if you don’t speak for years or decades, your family is always going to be a part of you.’

How Am I Supposed to Talk to You | New Voices

Lauren Holmes

‘Okay don’t sell yourself,’ said my mom, ‘sell the American dream.’

Paradise Lost

Yuri Kozyrev & Nathan Thornburgh

‘‘Abkhaz democracy reminds me a lot of America,’ an Abkhaz journalist tells me over coffee. ‘It’s a democracy of heavily armed people.’’

Five Things Right Now: Katherine Faw Morris

Katherine Faw Morris

Evie Wyld shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about.

Sand

John Biguenet

‘The catastrophe had not happened to all of us, we began to understand, but to each of us.’

Aracelis Girmay | First Sentence

Aracelis Girmay

‘For me, it happens most with early 90s R&B.’

Norman Rush and Colin McAdam in Conversation

Colin McAdam & Norman Rush

‘Who should write memoirs? I have the not-entirely-serious and absurdly restrictive idea that only morally extraordinary people could write them honestly without much shame’

Interview

Fiona Benson & Rachael Allen

‘I’ve always wanted to write from the gut, to write instinctively rather than cerebrally.’

Demeter

Fiona Benson

‘I head down the path hoping she’ll come / but when I look back she’s gone and my own voice / snags at her name like barbed wire on skin.’

Kinder Than Solitude

Yiyun Li

‘Being let down was Celia’s fate; life never failed to bestow upon her pain and disappointment she had to suffer on everyone’s behalf, so that the world could go on being a good place, free from real calamities.’

Picnic

Emily Berry

‘Watching the sea is like watching something in pieces continually striving to be whole / Imagine trying to pick up a piece of the sea and show it to a person / I tried to do that.’

Pyjamas

Rodney Koeneke

‘Lover, does it matter / how the river spends its glitter’