‘She does not stare at you, but when your eyes meet, she does not look away.’
So it is worrisome that you, in the late middle of your teenage years, are infatuated with a pretty girl. Her looks would not traditionally have been considered beautiful. No milky complexion, raven tresses, bountiful bosom or soft, moonlike face for her. Her skin is darker than average, her hair an…
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‘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.
‘The words are just dribbling out of my mouth. I can’t stop them. They’re like tears.’
‘I have come to believe that we are all migrants, that the experience of migration unites all human beings.’
‘I think of betrayal as a crack in the veneer of humanity, an act that reveals to us, and others, our base animal nature.’
The author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid, talks to John Freeman on The Granta Podcast.
‘There is an American literature that is anti-intellectual, apolitical and anti-social.’
