‘Damn, brother. You saw what they did to my face? / Poked out my eyes. Knocked teeth out of place’.
Boy, yaar, they sure called me some good names of late:
e.g. opportunist (dangerous). E.g. full-of-hate,
self-aggrandizing, Satan, self-loathing and shrill,
the type it would clean up the planet to kill.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
‘I grew up kissing books and bread.’
Salman Rushdie defends the act of writing novels.
Blake Morrison interviews Salman Rushdie in 1990, one year after he was placed under fatwa.
‘Let me tell you, boyo, bach: I love this place, where green hills shelter me from fear.’
‘You open a book by a writer you’ve never heard of and a new voice leaps off the page and makes you listen.’
‘I'm not quite the same person as the ‘me’ about whom the book is written.’
‘Post-modernism, if it can be said to exist at all, had in Calvino its most seductive showman.’
