‘The atmosphere in the house was thick with my father's depression.’
My father worked for twenty-eight years in the Hoover washing machine factory in Merthyr Tydfil. In South Wales at that time, when most labour was hard, physical, badly paid and often dangerous, people said it was a good job.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘I tried to work out how many elements I would have plugged if I retired at sixty, and soon I was fatigued before a simple subtraction.’
Fiction by A. Jiang.
‘Finally! I thought. Now I get to work in a big factory. I was fifteen and a half years old. I was a child laborer.’
Xiao Hai on coming of age in the factories of Shenzhen, translated by Tony Hao.
‘in the Huangma Mountains, everything rots readily’
A poem by Zheng Xiaoqiong, translated by Eleanor Goodman.
‘Question: ‘What do a Trabant and a condom have in common?’ Answer: ‘Both decrease the pleasure of the ride.’’
Durs Grünbein introduces photography by Martin Roemers.
A short story by Jianan Qian on stray dogs, desperation and re-education in rural China during the Cultural Revolution.
‘We continued to ski. The bon vivantedness of our exchanges became increasingly coded with a double-edged worry. Would we have to spend the night in the woods?’
