Christine Schutt

‘The permanence of his absence is a noise she hears when she listens to how quiet.’

Sigrid Rausing

Sigrid Rausing introduces Granta 143: After the Fact.

A.M. Homes

Read the title story from AM Homes' dazzling new collection of short stories, Days of Awe, available now from Granta Books.

Issue 143

Stephen Sharp

‘Last year father attacked me as a “wet radish”. This caused me to give up writing diary entries.’

Issue 143

Brian Allen Carr

‘I like to think the ones who are worst at coloring will remember me the longest.’

Issue 143

Nathaniel Mackey

Issue 143

Charles Glass & Don McCullin

‘ISIS’s second conquest of Palmyra astonished everyone, and fed the belief in a Syrian government conspiracy to assist ISIS.’

Ho Sok Fong

‘If she’d swerved any harder, she would have crashed right into the lake.’ New fiction by Ho Sok Fong, translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce.

Jason Cowley & Gus Palmer

‘They had believed they were coming to a new town. But, they said, Harlow wasn’t new: it looked old.’

Will Harris

‘I must / have been the only one to catch his eye, to hold it.’

Edward Burtynsky & Anthony Doerr

‘Often when I stare into the alien circuitry of a Burtynsky picture, it takes me a while to figure out what has actually been photographed.’ Anthony Doerr introduces Edward Burtynsky’s photographs.

Issue 143

David Flusfeder

‘It became a kind of mission to find contemporaries of theirs that weren’t closing down, establishments that have continued to flourish, or at least endure.’

Chelsey Minnis

‘It’s dangerous like a very powerful doorbell. / Or a portrait covered with a blanket.’

Issue 143

Susan Straight

‘The time of the Perseids never varied. That was why Dante’s mother had taught him the stars.’