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Explore Essays and memoir

Best Book of 1990: Anecdotes of Modern Art

Natalie Shapero

‘If I tell you a book is an encyclopedic and fast-paced tour of the interrelationship of making art and being in pain, need I say more?’

Between Great Fires

William Atkins

‘This is the perennial anxiety – that at any moment, day or night, you might be snatched and shackled and tried and sent back.’

Between Them

Richard Ford

‘It was my child’s outlook to think most things were right. And yet if life’s eternal drama is of events seeking a more perfect state, their life and mine was not that.’

Books Do Furnish a Room

Penelope Lively

‘The shelves say something about the person who has stocked them; they say much.’

Brontez Purnell Is Everything

Michelle Tea

Novelist, zinester, dancer, go-go-boy, punk, filmmaker, actor, performer, Brontez Purnell is everything.

Brother | State of Mind

Max Porter

‘We don’t often talk seriously or in depth about our childhood these days, but we know we could, and we know what good it did us.’

Cats Explain Things to Me | Discoveries

Typo

Take a paws from your busy day for this week’s Discoveries – guest edited by Granta’s very own Typo the cat.

Chère Madame

Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust’s letters to his neighbour, translated from the French by Lydia Davis.

Chris Kraus on Kathy Acker

Chris Kraus

Chris Kraus discusses her new biography, After Kathy Acker, which looks at the life and work of the artist twenty years after her death. 

Clown School

Nuar Alsadir

Political resistance, poetry, self-revelation all spring from that provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints.

Colin Thubron | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Colin Thubron

‘The death of travel – and of the travel book – has been predicted for almost a century.’

Comfort Woman

Erika Krouse

Erika Krouse on her work as a private investigator. ‘An escort service was providing prostitutes for football recruits, directly solicited by the university.’

Coming Home to the Counter-Revolution

Jack Shenker

‘My Cairo is an inverted city, one that wears its innards above the skin.’

Crossing Borders

Carys Davies

Carys Davies on how the settlement of the American West can help us understand Donald Trump’s nativism.