‘You can drink in a bar and sober up in the basement of a church, but everyone sleeps (or lies awake) in solitude.’
These are the ranks of the obsessive, the dissatisfied, the distorted, the strange: drug addicts, fetishists, compulsive cleaners, collectors of cats or snow globes or Caravaggios. Maybe everyone has something like this, large or small, pathological or merely unusual: something that serves, in the p…
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.
‘She wanted to enjoy herself, she wanted to try, but she didn't know where to begin.’
‘How little one knows, really, about one’s parents.’
Memoir by Didier Eribon translated by Michael Lucey.
‘Our imaginations are in service to the wrong ends.’
Olivia Laing and M. John Harrison on the commodification of the imagination.
‘No one is alone in their bed anymore.’
An excerpt from Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, translated by Penny Hueston.
'Han Suyin, elegant postcolonial diva avant la lettre, icon of the new, nonaligned Asia, thorn in the side of the dying British Empire and the American Right.'
