Explore Essays and memoir
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Friends
Jia Pingwa
‘Your friends might never know you intimately. There are those that will know you intimately but never be your friend.’
Jia Pingwa on friendship.
Doing the Work
Geoff Dyer
‘My life is full of regrets – I sometimes think I regret everything about my life – but I’ve never regretted the time spent riding the rails of Thatcher’s Britain.’
Geoff Dyer on conducting market research in the eighties.
Doing the Work
Rebecca May Johnson
‘When work is at mealtime, when is mealtime?’
Rebecca May Johnson on waitressing, hunger and eating at work.
Paper People
Yun Sheng
‘Otome games are about women writing romance plots designed to please women – paper hubbies and their voice actors are just a conduit to make the experience more believable.’
Yun Sheng on the rise of virtual love in China.
Doing the Work
Rachael Allen
‘We hated the tourists, but they were the reason we had jobs.’
Rachael Allen on working in a fish and chip shop in Cornwall.
Doing the Work
Junot Díaz
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
China Time
Thomas Meaney
‘At a time when China has become a unifying specter of menace for Western governments, this issue of Granta brings the country’s literary culture into focus.’
The editor introduces the issue.
Picun
Han Zhang
‘The stories being written by Picun writers and their peers show the effort and the ingenuity required to survive as migrant workers, builders of the economic miracle.’
Han Zhang on the New Workers’ Literature Group of Picun.
Adrift in the South
Xiao Hai
‘Finally! I thought. Now I get to work in a big factory. I was fifteen and a half years old. I was a child laborer.’
Xiao Hai on coming of age in the factories of Shenzhen, translated by Tony Hao.
Doing the Work
Emily Berry
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
