Granta | The Home of New Writing

Chloe Aridjis | Interview

It Was a Dog

Amaryllis Gacioppo

‘She liked to eat until her thighs felt gelatinous and slick with sweat, and her stomach ballooned out, sore and firm as though she had drunk cement that had now set.’

Two Poems

Aaron Fagan

‘it / Was chaos in the way nature is a chaos.’

Work, or the Swet Shop Boys

Hilary Plum

‘My work life – like, maybe, yours – is built around another, non-paying vocation.’

In Conversation

Katharina Volckmer & Eliza Clark

‘People are obsessed with authenticity – in a post-reality-TV, post-confessional-journalism world, fiction is simply not enough.’

Five Poems

Sawako Nakayasu

‘Although bara is homonymous with rose, this is not a rose-rose incident.’

Messrs. External & Bodily

Helen Marten

‘Space is marked and people do their best, but somewhere somebody made a false prophecy for the land.’

Pinky Agarwalia: Biography of a Child Saint in Ten Parts

Bhanu Kapil

‘Every person who travelled here is unsteady, I can feel that.’

Four Poems

Ian Seed

‘We were afraid to touch it – it looked cold enough / to burn us.’

Cooking from Memory

Barclay Bram

Barclay Bram reports from Chengdu – on the attention to detail in Sichuanese cooking.

Ogadinma

Ukamaka Olisakwe

‘She began to count; it was easier this way, counting, because she would not have to remember how she felt. She only had to remember how long she had counted.’

Notes on Craft

Amina Cain

‘I would rather work in front of, or behind, a story. I want to leave a chain of images that remain in the reader’s mind.’

Roses

Legacy Russell

‘What if we are not ‘well-behaved’? What then?’

Legacy Russell on her father and the FBI.

Alphonse

Marie-Hélène Lafon

‘He was long and white; his hands especially were long and white, and he sewed; he looked after the linen; he worked as a woman would; he lived in the house; he didn’t speak, he was rarely spoken to.’

Translated from the French by Stephanie Smee.

Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami

David Karashima

‘Luke believes that the early stories might not have been published if the author and translator were uncompromising.’

The Appointment

Katharina Volckmer

‘I know that I can trust you, and that death is silent. It’s never the loud things that kill us, the things that make us vomit and scream and cry. Those things are just looking for attention.’

That Time of Year

Marie NDiaye

‘The fact was that outside of summertime they knew nothing about the place at all.’

Translated from the French by Jordan Stump.

People From My Neighbourhood: Behind the Scenes

Clare Skeats

Clare Skeats on the cover design for Hiromi Kawakami’s latest book of stories, translated by Ted Goossen.

People From My Neighbourhood

Hiromi Kawakami

‘First prize went to the dog school principal, who of course had submitted a cartoon dog.’ Translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen.

Surviving Autocracy

Masha Gessen

We knew Trump’s range: government by gesture; obfuscation and lying; self-praise; stoking fear and issuing threats.

La Ville Morte

Benjamín Labatut

‘When the day came, even the nuns lay down inside the walls of their cloister.’

Gospel

Carys Davies

‘I would explain to you then, if I could, the theory that in the case of hairline shape, there are two possible variants or alleles: straight, or widow’s peak.’

In the Beginning

Diane Cook

‘They flavored their early stews with bacon. None of that stuff lasted long, though. That first day felt like a vacation in a wondrous new place. That feeling didn’t last long either.’

Amma

Sindya Bhanoo

‘She appeals to the fisherman, the rickshaw driver, the bricklayer. Her devotees are of all types’

The Price of Vagueness in a Pandemic

Eleanor Morgan

‘With each day bringing more confusion as this mysterious virus holds us in its grip, cognitive dissonance is everywhere.’

The Mistake

Peter Cameron

‘Yes, I was sick, she said. You’re very observant. She raised her hand and wiped the back of her leather glove across her lips.’

Introduction

Sigrid Rausing

‘But soon everything that had felt so tragic and dramatic to begin with – thousands of people ill and dying, the great pause, the intense dreams, the solidarity clapping – came to feel normal.’

A/S/L

Emma Cline

‘It was the afternoons that did it, three o’clock like a kind of death knell, the house seeming too still, too many hours of sunlight left in the day. How had Thora even started going to the chat rooms?’

At the Peckhamplex

Will Harris

‘the snow reflecting off / your torch was the / colour of your thoughts’

1 April 2020

Michael Hofmann

‘Living on money from the government, excused our duties and our liabilities, reducing our wants to eating and sleeping and what in the eighteenth century may have passed for exercise, the alderman’s stroll.’

The Perfect Companion

Joanna Kavenna

‘She was so understanding, so interesting, such an intellectual. She was also a wristwatch, but this hardly mattered.’

Arbos

Teju Cole

‘I made many pictures of such trees, and each time, some analogy to art would impress itself on me, the more so because of the universally locked museum doors.’

Secretions

Colin Herd

‘No I’m not tired I said. / No I’m not thirsty I said. / I’m sassy.’

Still Life

Leanne Shapton

‘Because that’s what I’m doing a lot of; looking around the interiors I occupy, the corners of my occupied apartment.’

Power and Privilege

Ken Babstock

‘We do it all day every day until we can’t see. / We do it with a belt between our teeth.’

Open Bookkeeping

Jenny Erpenbeck

‘I write an obituary that appears in the newspaper that she always used to read while drinking her afternoon tea. I receive €170.03 for the obituary.’
Translated from the German by Kurt Beals.

Poem Written from Inside a Leather Pig Mask

Sam Sax

‘child who dreams of growing into / a swan only to wake in terror at a mouth / filled with feathers.’