Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Essays and memoir

Cyprus United

Joe Dunthorne

‘The idea that football might provide an opportunity to overcome our dumber instincts seemed ridiculous now: football was a chance to set our idiocy free.’

Monster | State of Mind

Margo Jefferson

‘Today’s a day for you to feel blocked and impeded; a coward in work and love; resenting duty; suspecting pleasure.’

Coming Home to the Counter-Revolution

Jack Shenker

‘My Cairo is an inverted city, one that wears its innards above the skin.’

Mistaken | State of Mind

Mary Ruefle

‘I take it, if only as a substitute for my unknown name’

Imagined Memories

Francesca Todde & Nuar Alsadir

‘The creation of a screen memory is an encoding process: the screen retains all that is important from the past, but in encrypted form.’ Nuar Alsadir introduces the photographs of Francesca Todde.

Gay and Depressed | State of Mind

Andrew Solomon

‘It would be a bit more tolerable if we lived in a society that didn’t blame depression on its victims.’

Brother | State of Mind

Max Porter

‘We don’t often talk seriously or in depth about our childhood these days, but we know we could, and we know what good it did us.’

Chère Madame

Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust’s letters to his neighbour, translated from the French by Lydia Davis.

Books Do Furnish a Room

Penelope Lively

‘The shelves say something about the person who has stocked them; they say much.’

Threshold | State of Mind

Barry Lopez

‘What we’re about to see is greater than the thing you’re running from.’

The Peripatetic Penelope Fitzgerald

Lucy Scholes

Lucy Scholes on the highs, lows and package tours of Booker-prize-winning author Penelope Fitzgerald. ‘Fitzgerald’s life can only be attributed to the caprices of fate.’

Dead in Venice

Masahiko Shimada

‘If I wasn’t a fish spawned in the Brenta river, why was I so compelled to keep returning?’ Masahiko Shimada on his many trips to Venice.

Talking Italish

Antonio Melechi

‘For my mother and father, the past and present had both become foreign countries.’