‘We called ourselves the Fellowship, or sometimes the Church of God, but the world knew us as the Plymouth Brethren.’
Ken Follett reads his piece ‘Bad Faith’ from Granta 137, and discusses his upbringing in the Plymouth Brethren with Granta’s deputy editor Rosalind Porter.
‘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.
‘Every sect needs jargon. We did not have churches, we had halls; services were called meetings; the congregation was the assembly; elders were overseers’
‘It seemed perfectly normal for middle-class writers to tell the stories of the underclass. But the presumed creator of literature has been changing.’
Granta interviews Wu Qi.
‘How would I feel if I had messaged for years with someone that I later found out was an AI?’
Brea Souders speaks to Alice Zoo about chatbots, interconnection and the dialogue between photography and text in her work.
‘You are what you do, and you are what you write, to some extent, I believe that at least.’
Lauren Oyler on personality, intention and the collapse between private and authorial selves.
‘It’s perhaps hard to imagine a country with abundant mineral or oil reserves simply leaving that wealth underground. But there are precedents here, historical and contemporary.’
Granta interviews Thea Riofrancos.
‘in the Huangma Mountains, everything rots readily’
A poem by Zheng Xiaoqiong, translated by Eleanor Goodman.
