Granta | The Home of New Writing

Explore Essays and memoir

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.’

The Myth of Creative Genius

Natasha Pulley

‘There’s a mysticism that surrounds writing fiction.’

Brontez Purnell Is Everything

Michelle Tea

Novelist, zinester, dancer, go-go-boy, punk, filmmaker, actor, performer, Brontez Purnell is everything.

Amit Chaudhuri | First Sentence

Amit Chaudhuri

‘A scene in which nothing is ostensibly happening will absorb me; so will a paragraph that contains no vital piece of information.’

The Tamarind is Always Sour

Keane Shum

‘By law, the more than one million Rohingya in Myanmar are almost all excluded from Myanmar citizenship, making them the largest stateless group in the world.’

On Jesus’ Son

Eli Goldstone

‘Jesus’ Son is a song, a glorious clear hymn, full of the notes of bad decisions, of rotten fucking luck, of causing real and lasting damage to yourself and to the people around you.’

Remembering Denis Johnson

J. Ryan Stradal

When people ask me what Denis was like, I always think about how he listened far more intently than just about any writer I’d ever met.