Brian Evenson

‘They had stumbled upon a town and tried to approach it, but had been driven off with stones.’

Tomaž Šalamun

‘Heads of saints fell off and / smashed the glassy cages. My voice smashed them.’

Issue 128

Anthony Doerr

‘It has to be love, doesn’t it? In however many of its infinite permutations?’

Sigrid Rausing

Issue 128

Claire Vaye Watkins

‘He had a mind to surf through all crises and shortages and conflicts past and present.’

Lauren Holmes

‘Okay don’t sell yourself,’ said my mom, ‘sell the American dream.’

Issue 127

Toshiki Okada

‘If I had known she were heading for Tokyo then, and if I had known she thought of Tokyo as a city of zombies, I would have wanted to know, of course, whether she saw me that way, too.’

Yiyun Li

‘Being let down was Celia’s fate; life never failed to bestow upon her pain and disappointment she had to suffer on everyone’s behalf, so that the world could go on being a good place, free from real calamities.’

Janet Malcolm

The Emily Dickinson Series is a collection of collages by Janet Malcolm that appear in Granta 126: do you remember.

Daniel Gascón

‘It would’ve been a magical moment if my neighbours hadn’t started fucking at that very second.’

Andre Perry

‘I was stuck in Texas for a month. The days passed like slow-motion films.

Tomoyuki Hoshino

‘Spinning makes all that is illusory fall away.’ Translated from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom.

Issue 129

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.

Issue 129

Isabella Tree

‘I longed to know what she was thinking, what she did all day when she wasn’t performing rituals.’