A powerful series of essays about factory life and work appears in the current issue of Granta. In one piece, Ian Jack, editor of Granta, quotes from his mother’s writing about the factory where she met Jack’s father. Other pieces carefully question the very idea of the factory, and question the experience. Jack, thinking of his parent’s reverence for factory work, notes that his mother and father “often talked about ‘the factory’ as though there were only one of them, though my father, throughout his life, worked in many.” Other writers in the collection include Tessa Hadley, Joe Sacco, Neil Steinberg, and Luc Sante. Sante, author Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, worked in a New Jersey plastics factory to raise cash for college, all the while reading Céline in between machine cycles, noting that he first encountered Death on the Instalment Plan “spat out in brief, angry bursts separated by ellipses.” Sante says of Céline’s words that “their emotional content might have been designed for the circumstances.”