They lived in London at the end of the nineteen eighties. His wife was twenty-four. He was twenty-six. In her job, she earned eleven thousand pounds a year, and he earned thirteen thousand pounds a year.
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They lived in London at the end of the nineteen eighties. His wife was twenty-four. He was twenty-six. In her job, she earned eleven thousand pounds a year, and he earned thirteen thousand pounds a year.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
Philip Hensher was born in south London, where he still lives. He was educated at Oxford and at Cambridge, where his doctorate was on eighteenth-century English painting, and worked for six years as a clerk in the House of Commons. His novels are Other Lulus (1994), Kitchen Venom (1996), which won a Somerset Maugham Award, Pleasured (1998), The Mulberry Empire (2002) and The Northern Clemency (2008). His short stories are collected as The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife (1999). In addition he wrote the libretto for Thomas Adès’s opera, Powder Her Face.
More about the author →‘I liked his humourless intelligence, so redundant and so excessive in an MP.’
‘It was the first teasing days of spring, the scent in the air a cross between death and cum.’
Fiction by Stacy Skolnik.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘Most of us these days are dead or on autopilot / As for the wolves – they thrive’
Two poems by Claudine Toutoungi.
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