Essays & Memoir|Granta 13

William Buford

‘Dr O’Brien’s column was a curious achievement. And a mystifying one. It somehow succeeded in making Granta an accomplice in its own kidnapping.’

Essays & Memoir|Granta 13

Milan Kundera

‘May in Paris was an explosion of revolutionary lyricism. The Prague Spring was the explosion of post-revolutionary scepticism.’

Fiction|Granta 13

Josef Škvorecký

‘It was already dusk, a conspicuously symbolic black cloud was rising in the east, lit from the opposite direction by the orange and gold rays of the sun wreathed in a Technicolor sunset.’

Essays & Memoir|Granta 13

James Fenton

‘When I first saw the draft of the piece which follows, I realized that the book he was writing had reached an essential stage of articulacy.’

Essays & Memoir|Granta 13

Someth May

‘As I lay down and closed my eyes, the body of Comrade Chhith reappeared before me with a horrible vividness. I realized that he had been beaten to death.’

Fiction|Granta 13

John Berger & Nella Bielski

‘If I'm not transferred to the mines, I'll hold out, and you must go on thinking of me as dead: you will be closer, my heart, to the reality.’

Fiction|Granta 13

Reinaldo Arenas

‘There is nothing to be heard now; just, in the darkness, the racket of the victrolas in Loma Colorada barrio, and the organ lording it over all the other noises.’

Essays & Memoir|Granta 13

Orville Schell

‘Hurrying back to the rally ground, I could already hear the sound of martial music drifting out across Taicheng. As I approached the gates of the field, the music suddenly stopped and a strident voice began blasting out over a loudspeaker.’

Essays & Memoir|Granta 13

Edward W. Said

‘Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people.’

Essays & Memoir|Granta 13

Doris Lessing

‘No, Jane Somers is not my mother, but thoughts of women like my mother fed Jane Somers.’

Fiction|Granta 13

Doris Lessing

‘I had never thought that before, never felt life in that way, as I did then; washing Maudie Fowler, a fierce angry old woman.’

Fiction|Granta 13

Anita Brookner

‘The bride and groom were there all the time, in the centre, as they should be. A good-looking couple. But lifeless, figures from stock.’

Fiction|Granta 13

Martin Amis

‘Before me through the restraining bars, the sunset sprawls in its polluted pomp, full of genies, cloaked ghosts, crimson demons of the middle sky.’

Fiction|Granta 13

Russell Hoban

‘Far, far away in the night are live human beings whose breathing can be heard as they speak, and they're looking at their illuminated dials as I look at mine at this end of the darkness that curves with the night miles to the heave and swell of the ocean dawn.’

Essays & Memoir|Granta 13

Timothy Garton Ash

‘Like previous re-settlers, the East Germans now living in the West produced works in what I call the ‘Owl of Minerva’ school of literature. As the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk, so they, in flight from the system, made their reckoning with it.’

Essays & Memoir|Granta 13

Letters to the editor appearing in Granta 13: After the Revolution.