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.’
‘We decided then to tell each other exactly how a typical fuck played out in our marriages. We couldn’t believe we’d never done this before.’
Fiction by Miranda July.
‘What does that mean, vegan cheese? asks a lady who’d had no query about amuse-bouche.’
An extract from The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes.
‘A philosopher will reflect on the world from any place.’
Alexander Kluge on Germany, translated by Peter Kuras.
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