‘They treated their bodies like some exotic animal they’d found fast asleep, beings they needed to wake to truly know.’
I do not fear doctors, surgery, medicine or modernity, but in the spring of 2014, this I knew: If you let them, they’d slice you open on their own time. American medical professionals were wild for the surgical removal of term fetuses. Caesarean rates spiked at twelve and four, hours when doctors…
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘How can I accept a trauma or a loss that I cannot define?’
Rebecca May Johnson on pregnancy and divining the future.
‘you notice / that some of these men / are full of passionate music / while others pain your ears’
Poetry by Elvis Bego.
‘The monstrous years of my late teens lay lined up alongside the rest of my life like bullets in a gun.’
A story by Sophie Mackintosh.
‘The first time I was painted by Hannah Meehan, she spent some time arranging me into a pose that would work for her.’
A short story by Ana Kinsella.
An excerpt from Mariana Leky’s What You Can See From Here.
