‘This was the wild bunch that peopled my childhood nightmares.’
I love this snap. It is the only photograph I know of my father, mother and three siblings together and like all team photos in my life it has its own tale to tell. Inevitably, because of its age, the tale does not have a happy ending.
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.
‘It’s terrible to be young, always randy; one needs material.’
An extract from Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt.
‘Cigarettes, lorgnons, eggs benedict, cocktails mixed with maple syrup, long spills down Lanvin suits.’ Julia Armfield on why Mary McCarthy’s The Group is the best book of 1963.
‘They had believed they were coming to a new town. But, they said, Harlow wasn’t new: it looked old.’
‘On a cold morning last January, I travelled out to the Norfolk Fens to see a ghost.’
‘In our grandmother’s generation, when people became more religious, they turned devout. Now they turn fundamentalist.’
