Granta | The Home of New Writing

Cow and Company

The Case of the Missing Miss Vincent

Kevin Brockmeier

‘There is a sound to finishing a story like the first note of the 3.30 bell. Inside him a great crowd goes pouring into the daylight.’

The first resurrection

Laura Kasischke

‘The moth locked up all / winter in the strongbox.’

Car Concentrate

Etgar Keret

‘Women mostly touch it tentatively with the backs of their hands.’

Persist

Zaina Arafat

‘I grew obsessed with the place, thinking that getting to see it, to experience it, would make the pain of that fall go away.’

The Glitch

Rafael Frumkin

‘Them and not me, thought EJP. I can be invisible. I’m glitching.’

The Crack in the Door

Maria Chaudhuri

‘When my mother practises music, the world is her enemy.’

Dogfight Over Karachi

Khademul Islam

‘I slowly went down the stairs, feeling my being unspooling.’

João’s War

Julia Rochester

‘He repeatedly said, “I should have been a priest.“ He was right. People sought his benediction.’

Amateur Dramatics

Jonathan Lee

‘I heard the news from a nurse with a piece of tinsel tied around her waist: my father had become a hypochondriac.’

The Mountain

Christopher DeWeese

‘When the oxygen thins, / the world gets less reciprocal.’

The Diplomat’s Daughter

Chanelle Benz

‘Natalia used to be a wife. His name was Erik. His name was Viggo. His name was Christien. His name was Lucas. His name was Nils.’

The Second Night is Ending

Mikail Eldin

‘This winter and this forest will leave you with a shiver in your heart, which will appear whenever you see a winter forest, even in pictures.’

Observations on the Ground

Mary Ruefle

‘Those flowers belong to the dead.’

Justin Jin | Interview

Justin Jin & Francisco Vilhena

‘This disaster has been going on for decades. I want to protest against this as loudly as I can through photography.’

This Is Not A Test

Stuart Evers

‘In the end, because he loved her still, still so very much, he let her win.’

Ninth and Race

Dan Burt

‘Prostitution, gambling, fencing, contract murder, loan-sharking, political corruption and crime of every sort were the daily trade in Philadelphia’s Tenderloin, the oldest part of town.’

How We Got Mother Back

Valério Romão

‘With the passing of time we got used to hearing our brother being our mother.’

Sea Bean

Tim Fitts

‘Fred was the type whose worldview gazed through a shadow of things that could go wrong, like most of the South Philly lifers.’

Patrick French | First Sentence

Patrick French

‘In Edwardian days, if you were growing up in England (though Maurice was from Ireland) your life was regimented.’

This July

Wiam El-Tamami

‘It felt as though time would fall off a cliff on Sunday. We jokingly called it The End of the World.’

What It’s Like

Anya Yurchyshyn

‘I’d been telling myself I would get there and get through it. I’d been telling myself I was doing the right thing, that no one could escape doing this thing and that was why the thing was right, not wrong.’

A.L. Kennedy | First Sentence

A.L. Kennedy

‘I have never seen anyone eat figs in the street and feel I am unsurprised.’

After Silk Road

Mike Power

‘The Dark Web is a shadow internet, an unindexed, unseen and lawless corner of cyberspace.’

The Rainy Season

Lindsey Hilsum

‘In Rwanda today so much is unspoken or only whispered.’

Mess

Romesh Gunesekera

‘You have to go on the offensive until you smell victory. Then you have the aphrodisiac and can go full tilt.’

Pax Americana

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

‘It looks like life, or its oasis.’

Crow Fair

Thomas McGuane

‘You’re in a different world when your own mother doesn’t recognize you, or thinks you’re the stranger who gave her a hickey.’

Late in Life

A.L. Kennedy

‘Eating figs is different for girls.’

Opening Invocation

Jean-Paul de Dadelsen

‘Or otherwise, leaving the shore of the intermediate sea, / has it been a while since they’ve gone ahead / into the interior of lands of the spirit?’

Zone of Absolute Discomfort

Justin Jin

‘The icy hinterland is wretched to live in, but just hospitable enough to allow for the extraction of billions of tons of resources trapped beneath the ground.’

1979

Aminatta Forna

‘What happened in 1979 has happened many times before and many times since, in places where people have set themselves free and believed with all their hearts that the freedom they had fought for was real and lasting, only to be recaptured.’

A Sparrow Fallen

Dave Heath

‘a sparrow fallen; / blackness of pain shimmering / hard in soft white light’

From Dream to Dream

Yiyun Li

‘At what point had one’s life stopped belonging to one?’

Stalkers

Hari Kunzru

‘Writer: How do we get back? Stalker: Here, nobody returns.’

Revelations

Ange Mlinko

‘I think of this when raising my eyes / to a filigreed cross in a sanctuary‘’

After the War

Patrick French

‘My antipathy to military culture started early and it wasn't helped by living in a garrison town.’