The Bachelor Father
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Even Pretty Eyes Commit Crimes
M.J. Hyland
‘My father was sitting on my doorstep. He was wearing khaki shorts, his bare head was exposed to the full bore of the sun, and he was holding a pineapple.’
The Burning of the Rocks
John Kinsella
‘What locked-away / state of unawareness, other life form, / brings desire to combust / out of rock exposed to flame’
Throwing Stones at the Moon
María Victoria Jiménez
‘Maybe if I’d participated more when I was a student, I’d have had a well formed outlook about who people really are, and I would have better grasped evil.’
Zadie Smith | Interview
Zadie Smith & Ted Hodgkinson
Zadie Smith on writing tighter sentences, the ‘essential hubris’ of criticism and why novelists prefer writing in their pyjamas.
Into the Cosmos
Chloe Aridjis
‘In those fervently atheist times, it wasn’t God or his angelic messengers who would come forth from the sky, but the cosmonaut.’
Edinburgh Book Festival Special | Podcast
Kapka Kassabova & Peter Stamm
In this special Edinburgh Book Festival edition of the Granta Podcast Laura Barber talks to Kapka Kassabova (Street Without a Name, Twelve Minutes of Love) and Peter Stamm (Seven Years) about the often paradoxical relationship between writing and place.
Interview: Henry Marsh
Henry Marsh
Where did you learn to tell a story? Until adolescence I read Grimms’ Fairy Tales,...
In Transit | New Voices
Dina Nayeri
‘Now it seemed that the rest of life was only a bright, eye-burning white expanse, like the sun-bleached concrete slabs just outside this building.’
Henry Marsh | New Voices
Henry Marsh
Our New Voices series highlights the most exciting emerging talents on granta.com. The latest in...
The Conflicted Legacy of Meles Zenawi
Maaza Mengiste
‘Meles Zenawi’s legacy is as complicated as the life he chose to live, under a name (Meles) that he took from a fallen comrade during his days as a guerrilla fighter. ’
Graft vs. Host
Colin Grant
‘Oftentimes it took so long to ferry the injured that rather than send an ambulance the A&E doctors might as well have sent a hearse.’
Bush House
Mirza Waheed
‘I first stepped into Bush House on a dreary November day in 2001. It was a trepid walk.’
Grand Rounds
Chris Adrian
‘I used to fall asleep in those same seats during lectures just like this one.’
Dilation
Ben Lerner
‘My role in the slaughter doesn’t disqualify the beauty I find in all / forms of sheltered flame.’
Hardy Animal
M.J. Hyland
‘A few weeks after I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I made a pact with dying.’
The Cutting
Rose Tremain
‘I could not for too long delay my promise to Violet Bathurst to cut out her Cancer.’
Night
Alice Munro
‘I read books as usual, nobody knew there was a thing the matter with me.’
Fiction by Alice Munro.
The Lady and the Skull
Angela Carter
‘I believed I had defined the problem. / With which the picked skull had presented me.’
My Heart
Semezdin Mehmedinović
‘Today, it seems, was the day I was meant to die.’ Translated from the Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth.
Ordinary Light
Brad Feuerhelm & A.L. Kennedy
‘Here were humanity’s wilder beauties and our horrors, the physical record of hatreds, lusts and quiet obsessions.’ A.L. Kennedy introduces Brad Feuerhelm’s photographic collection.
The Perfect Code
Terrence Holt
‘At the centre of all this lies the patient, the only one in the room who isn’t shouting.’
The Former Mayor’s Ancient Daughter
Rachel Shihor
‘With us in the nursing home lives the ancient daughter of the former mayor’
The Third Dumpster
Gish Jen
‘It was about doing what sons were bound to do, which was not to pussyfoot around.’
People Don’t Get Depressed in Nigeria
Ike Anya
‘He has come to us against the wishes of his family and the village and I feel that I owe him something.’
Philanthropy
Suzanne Rivecca
‘They were all perpetually cowed by their own brutality, quivering and defeated by the measures they were forced to enact.’
Randy and Mummy at the Drawbridge
Linda H. Davis
‘Long after I had ceased feeling guilty about my father’s death, I still felt defined by it.’
The Father of Heliopolis
Pauls Toutonghi
‘Political institutions can be as fragile as the human bodies that run them.’
German Quasi-Story of Ulrika Thöus
Salvador Espriu
‘For hidden though they may be – and it is incontrovertible that they are – sooner or later the testicles will have to appear.’
Blind Spot
Teju Cole
‘I heard faint noises, the occasional car going down another street, a voice lightly thrown from its unseen body, the hum of distant machines, and the sound of my own breathing as I put one foot in.’
