Julia Elliott

‘Beatrice was my first love. The dark contours of her delicate skeleton, the glowing flesh made translucent by my X-ray gaze, drove me crazy.’

Claudia Rankine

‘Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue’

Hoa Nguyen

‘I wrote ‘valley’ when I meant ‘longing’ / Your laugh a river A trout kind of green.’

Mona Simpson

‘A year later, still in third person, I’d taken five days off my character’s long wait. I’d moved to present tense, though, for more immediacy.’

Sarah Thornton

Sarah Thornton, author of 33 Artists, 3 Acts, shares five links of what she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.

Katherine Faw Morris

‘A lot of babies were born in skiffs during storms, their umbilical cords cut with rusty pocketknives.’

Thirza Wakefield

‘The wild is no place for women—the film would seem to say.’

Melinda Moustakis

‘We all would like to think that with one line, one brush, we could make a reader fall madly in love, and there are writers that elicit such a response with the appropriately gorgeous.’

Etgar Keret & Sophie Lewis

‘Usually my wife makes fun of me.’

Darcey Steinke

‘I had a new persona I’d been planning to introduce the first day of school: a girl wise beyond her years who was not at all nerdy or spastic or prone to crying jags.’

Alan Warner

Granta Best Young British Novelist, Alan Warner, shares five things he’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.

Olivia Clare

‘I dislike sleep, he told the girl, matches keep me awake.’

Sigrid Rausing

Issue 128

Anthony Doerr

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