‘This is why he will survive this war to return to his wife and daughter, barring a blind bullet, an errant piece of shrapnel, some careless act of destiny.’
Overhead bullets concuss the air, disrupt Nzinga’s world. There’s no aim to the gunfire, no malice. A government patrol has stumbled on her father’s distant sentries, both sides firing blind in their mutual retreat.
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.
‘As a young man, I wanted to learn how to love, but in the end, I did nothing. I wanted to torture myself, but didn’t know where to begin.’
Fiction by Zou Jingzhi, translated by Jeremy Tiang.
‘It is rare to see photos of Daqing from the 1960s that are not part of the official feting of the oil boom.’
Photography by Haoihui Liu, introduced by Granta.
‘Fifty years I’ve played here, except for stretches in Arizona and Mississippi, after my divorce.’
Fiction by Kate Lister Campbell.
‘I spend the afternoon scarifying ceilings. My neck and shoulders are killing me by the time I leave.’
Fiction by Rue Baldry.
An exciton consists / of the escaped negative / (electron) / and the positive hole / it left behind.
