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.
‘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.
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 →
‘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.
‘How do we imagine the past of those we love?’
Arthur Asseraf on family and fractured memories.
‘It’s a paper bag filled with pastries. Chicken turnovers.’
An extract from Family Meal by Bryan Washington.
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.