As soon as I walked in, I knew he wanted to touch it. It was a small lift, just a box on a rope really. You could hear the churning of the wheel high above, and the whole thing creaked as it wound you up through the building.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘The issue was the first of its kind. Trust me, it said. I know what I am talking about. These young writers are the future of literature. Watch. History will prove me right.’ – Bill Buford, Granta editor (1979-95)
‘Cover your nose and mouth, the order came, swift and useless; if they’d had their turbans they would have wound them around their faces but there were only the balaclavas.’
Fiction by Kamila Shamsie from the 2013 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘She felt exhausted, emptied out; she thought of the day that had passed – it was astonishing to her, that a single set of hours could contain so many separate states of violent feeling.’
Fiction by Sarah Waters from the 2003 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘This is the one thing I know from the minute I lift the receiver and slip that voice inside my ear: it will happen.’
Fiction by A.L. Kennedy from the 1993 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘As it was, my grandfather began helping me to paint without my having to ask him.’
Fiction by Kazuo Ishiguro from the 1983 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘The year I'm talking about, the year my sister left (or whatever you choose to call it), I was twenty-one and she was seventeen’.
‘Whatever porn is or is not, like dance it is rooted in the body.’
Saskia Vogel on the relationship between dance and pornography.
‘In clothes, I met strangeness with strangeness. They dressed me with a kind of distanced power.’
Rosie Findlay on fashion and religion.
‘I was not a strong mayor. I was an email. I was a little bit high.’
A short story by Avigayl Sharp.
‘I don’t know if you’ve ever held a fairy tale in your hand, but it has this amazing pliability.’
Sabrina Orah Mark and Martin Riker on fairy tales, form and the imaginary realm.
‘Now and then it can appear that an entire magazine is opening up the silks, searching for a soft place to land.’
