The abortion took five hours. Their appointment was for two o’clock, and they left at seven.
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‘Olga was noble. She was Amazonian. She felt exhausted and humiliated, but she also had force.’
The abortion took five hours. Their appointment was for two o’clock, and they left at seven.
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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.
Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. He is the author of the novels Politics and The Escape, and Kapow!, a novella, as well as a book of international novels, which won a Somerset Maugham award. His work has been translated into 30 languages.
More about the author →Adam Thirlwell speaks to Granta’s Yuka Igarashi about sex, history, translation, using tempo in novels and how his writing has evolved over the past decade.
‘It really wasn’t normal for me to wake up and not know how I got there. A normal pastime for me was to be intent on mathematical problems, or models of voting patterns in different democratic states.’
‘The thing I really love about this story is how it manages its matryoshka feat – to be at once a free floating meditation, leaping like some street cat from wall to wall, while also going deeper and deeper into a single theme.’
‘I suppose it’s that word hyper that I was after: I was trying to find a form for a kind of hyper energy or anxiety.’
‘We decided then to tell each other exactly how a typical fuck played out in our marriages. We couldn’t believe we’d never done this before.’
Fiction by Miranda July.
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