‘You have to go on the offensive until you smell victory. Then you have the aphrodisiac and can go full tilt.’
In November, I had my first military encounter in Jaffna. Not what you think. Not a skirmish. The war here, in Sri Lanka, was over. But you could say it was an encounter with the war within: guilt, which I am beginning to see riddles everything. I was asked to take Father Perera and his friend, Patr…
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.
‘Identity, it seemed, was not so self-determined after all.’
‘The past has never been as present as it is now in the world. But at the same time, all over the world, the determination to manipulate what we know has also never been stronger.’
‘It is to Shakespeare’s pages I return whenever I feel I am sinking. There I can be sure to find a lifeline.’
‘In 1956, my father was thirty-nine years old. He didn't even know how to boil an egg.’
'I let the tears roll down to the sides of my mouth, and licked them to harden my insides. I wanted to cry gushingly, but I couldn't.'
‘It didn’t matter to me what we would be doing or where. It didn’t matter to me in the least.’ Jung Young Moon, translated from the Korean by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton.
