Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Essays and memoir

Lister’s Mill

Liz Jobey

‘The city has defied many plans for its regeneration and its centre is a dispiriting mess’

Martin and Me

Thomas Healy

‘The Dobermann Club was run by a strong-voiced ex-army man who brooked no nonsense.’

The Muse in the Cellar

James Lasdun

‘It seems to me that at the age of thirteen, I had already developed the cynicism of a seventy-year-old dictator.’

Motley Notes

Ian Jack

‘The last issue of Granta celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary and retraced a little of its pre-1979 history as a magazine for and by the students of Cambridge University.’

The Lanes

John McGahern

‘The soil in Leitrim is poor, in places no more than an inch deep.’

The Merry Widow

Edmund White

’She met my father in Texas and then they moved north, where I was born in Cincinnati.‘

Mutations

Masha Gessen

‘With a disease as unpredictable as cancer, the opportunity to blame an actual person is an unexpected temptation.’

The Collector

Paul Maliszewski

‘Mitchell's writing is a blueprint for a New York which was then disappearing and is now almost lost.’

Mother of the Year

Paul Theroux

‘The words ‘big family’ have the same ring for me as 'savage tribe', and I now know that every big family is savage in its own way.’

Notes from the Land of Nod

Jim Lewis

‘You can drink in a bar and sober up in the basement of a church, but everyone sleeps (or lies awake) in solitude.’

How to Stop Your Mother-in-Law from Drowning

Richard Beard

‘This is one of those stories about she and you. She is the mother-in-law. You are the man who duped her daughter, or the woman who ensnared her son.’

When There is Talk of 1945

Ryszard Kapuscinski

‘All through the war I dream of shoes.’

Motley Notes

Ian Jack

Ian Jack’s introduction to Granta 87: Jubilee.

Benjamin Pell Versus the Rest of the World

Tim Adams

‘You hear Benjamin Pell long before you see him.’