‘I ask my wife what she means by kidnap exactly, but she says never mind’.
I ask my wife what she means by kidnap exactly, but she says never mind. We are at Pygmy’s after my party where Richard Widmark never showed, and the jukebox isn’t working again. All the music Pygmy’s has is a boom box on the bar, playing ‘Black on Both Sides’. My wife likes the bit on ‘…
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‘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.
‘Across the river, in a Catholic enclave in the Waterside district, there was a disused funeral home in which, three nights a week, at 6d a shot, contraband teen movies could be sat through and sometimes seen, according to the state of the projector.’
‘In every other respect – colour, country, creed – these people might have nothing in common. Some were convicted criminals, others sought political asylum, still others had overstayed their visas or were accused of Green Card frauds, and a few might even be mistakes, the victims of computer or human error. But this one bond was absolute.’
‘An enormous black form rose from the water. Uncle Feng told me in a low voice to run fast.’
Fiction by Can Xue, translated by Annelise Finegan.
‘At a time when China has become a unifying specter of menace for Western governments, this issue of Granta brings the country’s literary culture into focus.’
The editor introduces the issue.
‘I took myself off to the woods, the fragments of the great forests that once spread over our continent.’
