I hope you don’t mind but I wrote this first part out, so I’ll just read it now and get it over with. Mr Jefferies helped me with it. I hope that’s OK.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘Before I begin I'd like to say that I'll try to remember everything as best I can, though sometimes I know it won't be right.’
I hope you don’t mind but I wrote this first part out, so I’ll just read it now and get it over with. Mr Jefferies helped me with it. I hope that’s OK.
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.
Stewart O'Nan was born in 1961 in Pittsburgh. His father was an engineer; his mother an economics professor. He studied aerospace engineering at Boston University and worked for five years as a test engineer at Grumman Aerospace, Long Island. Subsequently he took a master's degree in fiction at Cornell University and since 1990 he has taught creative writing, currently at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His three published novels include Snow Angels (1994). He lives with his wife and two children in Avon, Connecticut, where he is working on various stages of further novels and on a screenplay based on the life of Edgar Allan Poe.
More about the author →
‘Every time I tried to write more, it turned out to be a fruitless endeavor – I felt like I was trapped in a sealed room with no windows.’
Fiction by Yu Hua, translated by Michael Berry.
‘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.
‘One did not have high hopes for Gettysburg. Nor for Pennsylvania in general. Having grown up in Indiana, Diana felt she’d earned her condescension.’
Fiction by Jessi Jezewska Stevens.
‘He takes the knife, cuts the barb from the body, sends it back to the depths of the river.’
An extract from Not a River by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott.
‘The past is no longer behind me but in front.’
An extract from About Ed by Robert Glück.
‘I would rather work in front of, or behind, a story. I want to leave a chain of images that remain in the reader’s mind.’
Granta magazine is run by the Granta Trust (charity number 1184638)
The copyright to all contents of this site is held either by Granta or by the individual authors, and none of the material may be used elsewhere without written permission. For reprint enquiries, contact us.