Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Fiction

Story of My Life

A.L. Kennedy

‘Story of my life – maybe – going to the dentist.’

Room 536

A.L. Kennedy

‘The world cannot be as this is, I refuse to accept it.’

Failing to Fall

A.L. Kennedy

‘This is the one thing I know from the minute I lift the receiver and slip that voice inside my ear: it will happen.‘

Late in Life

A.L. Kennedy

‘Eating figs is different for girls.’

Big Blue Bus

Etgar Keret

‘I want to I want to I want to I want to I want to I want to I want to.’

Accident

Etgar Keret

’Thirty years I’m a cabbie,’ the small guy sitting behind the wheel tells me, ’thirty years and not one accident.’

Car Concentrate

Etgar Keret

‘Women mostly touch it tentatively with the backs of their hands.’

Reference Points

Philip Kerr

‘It was eating oysters, four hundred of the bivalve sons-of-bitches, that finally killed my father, in a theatre-bar off St Martin's Lane.‘

Ice, Mating

Uzma Aslam Khan

‘You even tell yourself that you have found it.’

The Last Place on Earth

Tracy Kidder

‘The living-room windows begin to reflect the lights on the plastic Christmas tree, and the view through those windows is fading, the woods growing thicker, the birches glowing in the dusk.’

The Adjuster

Tracy Kidder

’On the day my career at Fireplace Mutual began, six of us recruits filed into the smoke-filled office of the Supervisor of Adjusters, Mr Kreisky.’

Body Language

Juhea Kim

‘Always being pulled in opposite directions was how she remained upright.’

The Dune

Stephen King

‘Being able to read obituaries in advance gives a man an extraordinary sense of power.’

Stratford Marsh

Esther Kinsky

‘Estuary English, the tongue of the river mouth, open vowels, clipped syllables that nonetheless spilled into one: I found it hard to listen to. The words snapped at my ears: malicious fish.’