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Explore Essays and memoir

hardcore thigh burn | Discoveries

Eleanor Chandler

This week’s Discoveries is full of rad poetry, translations and criticism.

Sara Wheeler | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Sara Wheeler

‘Mass travel has liberated the form. No amount of package tours will stop ordinary life quietly continuing everywhere on earth.’

Kelly Magee | First Sentence

Kelly Magee

‘Mothers: our first source of love, our first heartbreak.’

Forbidden Games

Tia Wallman

‘We do not understand why, nor did we covet such long life, but here we are, our respective addictions and madness with us to the end.’

Cats Explain Things to Me | Discoveries

Typo

Take a paws from your busy day for this week’s Discoveries – guest edited by Granta’s very own Typo the cat.

Wendell Steavenson | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Wendell Steavenson

‘Our globalised world of easyJet and Google Translate does not seem to have fostered any greater understanding’

Olivia Laing | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Olivia Laing

‘Which bodies can go where might be the central question of our century.’

An Island Presence

Howard Cunnell

‘I can almost believe in the permanence of these warm days, this unchanging child whose hand fits mine. But I can feel the cold and the darkness coming.’

The Colonel’s New Life

Charlotte Eagar

A refugee family’s journey from Syria to Germany.

Karan Mahajan | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Karan Mahajan

‘Too often, a kind of travel writing – especially the novel set abroad in an exotic locale – feels like a way of allegorizing and escaping problems at home.’