Dave Eggers

‘All he wants is to be a man sitting on a riverbed.’

Issue 124

Héctor Abad

‘A pale-faced, near-sighted urbanite like me is nothing less than handicapped in the heart of the jungle.’

Issue 124

Rachael Boast

Issue 124

Teju Cole

‘The city is a sea that can swallow you at any time, a monster that can lash out without warning, a hell of variables and uncertainties.’

Catherine Chung

‘The danger with chasing fantasies is that the reality is often so different than the imagination.’

John Balaban

‘Her mother planted a garden in Manhattan. / In that garden is a tree. Some look on it and feel restored. / Others, when the wind lifts its leaves, want to scream.’

António Lobo Antunes

‘I’m doing my best to survive all this, but sometimes I feel so homesick that words simply empty of meaning.’

Michael Dickman

‘A cloudless sky and I’m back / an ice-cold sky-blue rag / for my eyes’

Lauren Beukes

‘It has taken this to make me realize that de-humanizing is not only something that other people do to you. It can be self-inflicted too.’

Edwidge Danticat

‘Ms Mars is a singularly gifted writer, who with each new work delves more profoundly into themes that are both timely and essential.’

Naomi Alderman

Naomi Alderman shares five songs she loves to write to.

Jeffrey Eugenides

‘The playfulness of the language, the way the mandarin wit, line by line, consorts with grisly or louche material.’

Ellah Allfrey

In the first partnership of its kind, Audible and Granta magazine are collaborating on the unabridged audiobook production of Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4.

Ned Beauman

‘Growing up, you got so used to all your secrets being sad or shameful that you came to assume they were, like alkyl halides, intrinsically neurotoxic, and now he had learned for the first time that they weren’t.’