Q. What is your name in Russian?
A. Ustin Voronkov.
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Q. What is your name in Russian?
A. Ustin Voronkov.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
Vanessa Manko was formerly Dance Editor of the Brooklyn Rail. She has danced with the Charleston Ballet Theater and taught writing at SUNY Purchase and New York University. ‘The Interrogation’ is an extract from her first novel, The Un-American.
More about the author →‘I feel like I’ll spend a great many years unravelling whatever is being stored inside of me just now.’
‘She is thorough in a way that is off putting to people. It makes for a good secretary, not a good conversationalist.’
Fiction by Madeline Cash.
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘Bolshevism, like most millenarian movements, proved a one-generation phenomenon.’
Yuri Slezkine on Soviet history and the generational arc of revolution.
‘I’m simply trying to do good, Sharon, in the way that I can.’
Fiction by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump.
‘I didn’t think she was happy; I thought she was in love, but I didn’t know what that told me, if it told me anything.’
Fiction by Jennifer Atkins.
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