Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Fiction

Arithmetic Town

Todd McEwen

‘Free play is when you have fun instead of playing kickball.’

At the Edge of Night

Friedo Lampe

An excerpt from Friedo Lampe’s At the Edge of Night, translated from the German by Simon Beattie.

At The Kitchen Table

Peter Orner

‘Your husband dies, you’re a widow. There’s almost joy in it. Why not scream it? Glory.’

Auto-Suggestion

Toby Litt

‘I began to think, for no particular reason, about what the exact series of events would be were I to die at that moment – before, even, my coffee went cold.’

B-ABEL

Jeremy Lane

‘Partial, our protagonist, to the palatal; prone, too, to the plosive; and apt, you’ve heard, to alliterate.’

Bad Seeds

Masatsugu Ono

‘Evil, she told herself. That was the name of the flower.’

Bears in Mourning

Adam Mars-Jones

‘When I think about it, it was terrible the way we behaved when Victor died. We behaved as if we were ashamed of him, or angry.’

Beetle

Joanna Kavenna

An excerpt from ZED, the forthcoming novel by Joanna Kavenna, a Granta Best of Young British Novelist.

Bezoar

Guadalupe Nettel

‘This was the morning I discovered the anatomy of a hair.’ New fiction by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery.

Bicycle Thieves

Blake Morrison

‘Late June, scorched grass and sprinklers, the sky as if scuffed and beaten. Too hot to work, too lazy to think.’

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.’

Black Bazaar

Alain Mabanckou

‘Roger The French-Ivorian understood that I didn’t appreciate his tone of voice and ordered two Pelforts to win me back.’

Black Milk

Tina Makereti

‘Despair sat on her shoulders where her wings should have been. Darkness consumed her, the quivering lip of a dying abalone, grease in the barrel of a gun.’ 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize – regional winner for the Pacific.

Blade Culture

Atticus Lish

‘As a kid, he played video games and roughhoused on the beach and joined a gang.’