Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Essays and memoir

Best Book of Any Year: A Thousand and One Nights

Mazen Maarouf

Mazen Maarouf on why A Thousand and One Nights is the best book of any year.

Best Book of 2013:
The Crocodiles

Noor Naga

Noor Naga on why The Crocodiles by Youssef Rakha is the best book of 2013.

Best Book of 2014: H is for Hawk

Chigozie Obioma

Chigozie Obioma on Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, the best book of 2014.

Best book of 2015: The Argonauts

Lucia Osborne-Crowley

Lucia Osborne-Crowley on why The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson is the best book of 2015.

Best Book of 1993: The Smell of Apples

Magogodi oaMphela Makhene

Magogodi oaMphela Makhene on Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples.

Best Book of 1952: The Palm-Wine Drinkard

Sandra Newman

Sandra Newman on why Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard is the best book of 1952.

A Language of Figs

Sema Kaygusuz

Sema Kaygusuz on the inheritances of genocide and historical memory, and what her own grandmother, a survivor of the Dersim Massacre in Turkey, taught her about life and language.

Maly Trostinets

Joseph Leo Koerner

‘It was also mainly Viennese Jews who, between 6 May and 10 October 1942, were murdered in Maly Trostinets. Tens of thousands of Jews from elsewhere died there too, together with Soviet soldiers, Belarusian citizens, both Jewish and Christian, and partisans.’

Tom McCarthy | On Europe

Tom McCarthy

‘Like theatre itself, Europe is a contraption, a machine.’

Itinerant

Andrew Miller

‘Was this an adventure or was I in trouble? At what point did one begin to shade into the other?’

The Poetics of Trauma

Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson

Swedish poet and psychoanalyst Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson on trauma, silence and linguistic analysis of asylum seekers. Translated from the Swedish by Peter Graves.

Squish Me Tender

D. Mortimer

‘I wasn’t sure if I was having an orgasm or evolving.’

Sophie Lewis | Notes on Craft

Sophie Lewis

Sophie Lewis on the craft of translation.