‘Christine’s hair had begun to dry, and she looked different, with her hair down and her glasses on. Her earnestness made her look younger, and took me back to the bar where we’d sat in Pennsylvania years ago.’
My husband and I were in Tivoli, and we went to the gardens at Villa d’Este. He’d been to Italy before, but it was my first trip. There were rails in front of the fountains because the water was so polluted, they wanted to keep you from being splashed.
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‘Where his mother had surely hoped for a sweet little mouth, Dengue Boy had misshapen flesh bristling with maxillary palps.’
Fiction by Michel Nieva, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.
‘It was the third day that summer when temperatures had soared above fifty degrees Celsius.’
Fiction by Andrea Chapela, translated from the Spanish by Kelsi Vanada.
‘She was so understanding, so interesting, such an intellectual. She was also a wristwatch, but this hardly mattered.’
Fiction by Joanna Kavenna, a Granta Best Young British Novelist in 2013.
‘In the future we have to be as interesting to the AI as our pets are to us.’
Fiction by Eugene Lim, first published in Granta 145: Ghosts.
‘Disabled people who use tech to live are cyborgs. Our lives are not metaphors.’
An essay by Jillian Weise, soon to be a book published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
‘As I began to flip through a literary magazine, I was stopped by a photograph of myself as a young girl, standing beside my college professor.’
Ann Beattie shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.
‘The word money popped up like a bit of the ocean’s detritus riding in on a wave, but her lips formed the words ‘Merry Christmas’.’
‘Then winter ended and spring came, and I thought, even if I don’t believe there’s a poem in anything any more, maybe I’ll write a story.’
‘Several times I’ve wanted to title something one thing, but have realized or been persuaded it isn’t a good idea.’
‘Guys like V seem to be everywhere in Brazil these days: riding in vehicles they can’t afford, buying the latest generation TV sets and smart phones, getting hooked on endless installment plans and the allure of easy credit.’
