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The Emily Dickinson Series
Janet Malcolm
The Emily Dickinson Series is a collection of collages by Janet Malcolm that appear in Granta 126: do you remember.
Blue Moon
Hiromi Kawakami
‘Rather than death itself, it is the disappearance of traces that seems unbearable and sad. The disappearance of all signs that I existed.’
Key Stroke
Will Self
Striking the keys of the same typewriter that once sat under J.G. Ballard’s fingers, Will Self reimagines the legendary writer’s last days.
Maruti 800
Rana Dasgupta
‘Like a tiny old woman surrounded by strapping grandsons, the Maruti 800 was in fact the progenitor of all that new, muscular, vehicular variety.’
Mona Simpson | First Sentence
Mona Simpson
‘A year later, still in third person, I’d taken five days off my character’s long wait. I’d moved to present tense, though, for more immediacy.’
Be Careful with that Fan
Andre Perry
‘I was stuck in Texas for a month. The days passed like slow-motion films.
Thing with Feathers that Perches in the Soul
Anthony Doerr
‘It has to be love, doesn’t it? In however many of its infinite permutations?’
Nudity
Norman Rush
‘I nursed a precocious rage at the stratagems society was employing to keep me from seeing naked women.’
Laparotomy
Alexandra Lucas Coelho
‘At forty, I think the world leads to the body. Besides, laid out on a stretcher, you are your only home’ .
Melinda Moustakis | First Sentence
Melinda Moustakis
‘We all would like to think that with one line, one brush, we could make a reader fall madly in love, and there are writers that elicit such a response with the appropriately gorgeous.’