Granta 137

The Fairytale

Jennifer Kabat

‘In Hollin Hills, we believed our flatware could change the world.’ Jennifer Kabat on the intersection of modernist architecture and espionage.

Discoveries: Polymorphous Perversity

New erotica from Anaïs Nin; Emily Dickinson’s bedroom; Isaac Asimov’s dystopias, interracial love circa 1963 and more.

Vladimir in Love

Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard

Ivan Chistyakov

‘Freedom, even with hunger and cold, is still precious and irreplaceable.’

[adrotate][/adrotate]

Authors

Granta Reads: Angela Carter’s ‘Cousins’

Granta Reads: Darcey Steinke’s ‘Frankenstein’s Mother’

First Sentence: A.L. Kennedy

A.L. Kennedy

‘I have never seen anyone eat figs in the street and feel I am unsurprised.’

Five Things Right Now: Eliza Robertson

Eliza Robertson

‘For me, astrology’s opened this new language and field of understanding. ’

[adrotate][/adrotate]

Classics

How to Write about Africa

Binyavanga Wainaina

‘Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.’

Chickens and Eggs

Doris Lessing

‘Twenty-one days it takes to hatch eggs, twenty-one nights, and there sits the great fierce hen who had accepted me as protector and jailer for that time.’

Time’s Arrow

Martin Amis

’I came rushing upward out of the blackest sleep to find myself surrounded by doctors . . . ’

Outside the Whale

Salman Rushdie

‘For a man as truthful, direct, intelligent, passionate and sane as Orwell, ‘politics’ had come to represent the antithesis of his own world-view.’

Frankenstein’s Mother

Darcey Steinke

‘If pain is what makes others real to us, there was not another human being more real to me than my mother.’

[adrotate][/adrotate]

Lucky Pierre and the Coldwater Flat

Robert Coover

‘Projections run riot, mirrors tip and weave, there’s a blur of images like film jumping out of its sprockets.’

Martha, Martha

Zadie Smith

‘From her tiny office on the third floor, Pam Roberts looked through a window and correctly identified the Martha Penk she was waiting for, a shrimpish girl pushing twenty-two, lost down there.’

Beach

Roberto Bolaño

‘I said to myself that maybe he wasn’t about to die.’

Discoveries: Polymorphous Perversity

The Sufferings of this Present Time Are Not Worthy to Be Compared With the Glory Which Shall Be Revealed in Us

Discoveries: Polymorphous Perversity

New erotica from Anaïs Nin; Emily Dickinson’s bedroom; Isaac Asimov’s dystopias, interracial love circa 1963 and more.

Introduction

Sigrid Rausing

‘What future youth movement might capture them, those international participants in virtual hunts?’

The Shepherds

Lauren Hough

‘Our pasts are so unbelievable we need a witness for our own memory.’

Discoveries: Polymorphous Perversity

New erotica from Anaïs Nin; Emily Dickinson’s bedroom; Isaac Asimov’s dystopias, interracial love circa 1963 and more.

My Angel

Adam Thorpe

‘I am full of unreal desires and worthless imaginings.’

Julie’s Life

Emmanuel Carrère & Darcy Padilla

‘Even today, she still speaks with emotion about Dorian, the transsexual so proud of her breasts, Diane, who weighed only sixty-five pounds, and Steven, who was so frightened of dying alone that Darcy wished she could promise to be with him when the time came.’ Emmanuel Carrèrre on addiction and poverty in an forgotten America.