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Sarah Gerard | Five Things Right Now

Sarah Gerard

Sarah Gerard on Leonora Carrington, shoegaze music and gaslighting.

Sick of Steel

Gus Palmer & Emilie Harley

Tamburi sits in the shadow of one of Europe’s largest steel plants. The pollution is giving the locals cancer.

Borne

Jeff VanderMeer

‘The map of the old horizon was like being haunted by a grotesque fairy tale, something that when voiced came out not as words but as sounds in the aftermath of an atrocity.’

The Unmailed Letter

Kseniya Melnik

‘I was already suspicious of you before you were even born. You were Mama’s then, eating her up from the inside like a little cancer. She became yellow. She lost chunkfuls of hair.’

Morwari Zafar | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Morwari Zafar

‘What satellites and the internet don’t do is give a voice to experience. And that’s where travel writing endures.’

The Back Way and the Way Back

Will Boast

Despite emerging from two decades of misrule under Yahya Jammeh, many Gambians still aspire to go ‘the back way’ into Europe.

hardcore thigh burn | Discoveries

Eleanor Chandler

This week’s Discoveries is full of rad poetry, translations and criticism.

Two Poems

Pascale Petit

‘His sheets smell of formalin. / She feels as if her insides // are outside her, in a freezer.’

Sara Wheeler | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Sara Wheeler

‘Mass travel has liberated the form. No amount of package tours will stop ordinary life quietly continuing everywhere on earth.’

Kelly Magee | First Sentence

Kelly Magee

‘Mothers: our first source of love, our first heartbreak.’

Sana Krasikov and Viv Groskop In Conversation

Sana Krasikov & Viv Groskop

Sana Krasikov and Viv Groskop discuss the Soviet experience, the rise of mass cynicism and the politics of Russia and the US today.

Fourth Person Singular

Nuar Alsadir

‘The wet in the air is like signal anxiety: life is about to / change.’

Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead

Olga Tokarczuk

‘They gazed at us calmly, as if we had caught them in the middle of performing some ritual whose meaning we could not fathom.’

Exit West

Mohsin Hamid

‘Everyone was foreign, and so, in a sense, no one was.’

Forbidden Games

Tia Wallman

‘We do not understand why, nor did we covet such long life, but here we are, our respective addictions and madness with us to the end.’

Lincoln in the Bardo

George Saunders

‘Must I deny my predilection, and marry, and doom myself to a certain, shall we say, dearth of fulfillment?’

Cats Explain Things to Me | Discoveries

Typo

Take a paws from your busy day for this week’s Discoveries – guest edited by Granta’s very own Typo the cat.

Qualitative Leaps

Sana Krasikov

‘Breaking your family’s heart was the price you paid for rescuing your own.’

Wendell Steavenson | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Wendell Steavenson

‘Our globalised world of easyJet and Google Translate does not seem to have fostered any greater understanding’

Sana Krasikov | Five Things Right Now

Sana Krasikov

‘The world is teeming with demons who are always looking for ways to screw with your good fortune.’

The Secular World

Nadeem Aslam

‘There is no lack of talent in this country. All we lack is decent leaders.’ Pakistan’s secular world runs against fundamentalism in Nadeem Aslam’s latest novel, The Golden Legend.

Better Protect America

Padma Viswanathan

Padma Viswanathan on the absurdities of the US Border Patrol Agency. ‘The new security was going to be unpredictable, by design.’

Olivia Laing | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Olivia Laing

‘Which bodies can go where might be the central question of our century.’

F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

Luke Neima

Not long before he died on 21 December 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald recorded himself reading a version of John Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.

On Stage

Bandi

‘Where emotions are suppressed and actions monitored, acting only becomes ubiquitous, and so convincing that we even trick ourselves.’

An Island Presence

Howard Cunnell

‘I can almost believe in the permanence of these warm days, this unchanging child whose hand fits mine. But I can feel the cold and the darkness coming.’

Matt Dillon

Michelle Tea

‘Michelle had learned a valuable lesson: Do not leave the house unless you look ready to meet Matt Dillon.’ From the novel Black Wave.

The Book of the Dead

Orikuchi Shinobu

A gothic tale of love between a noblewoman and a ghost in eighth century Japan, translated by Jeffrey Angles.

The Colonel’s New Life

Charlotte Eagar

A refugee family’s journey from Syria to Germany.

Chanel Nº 5

Victor Lodato

‘The liquid tingled, a subtle electrification, as the scent changed, bloomed, became an extension of the boy himself.’

Karan Mahajan | Is Travel Writing Dead?

Karan Mahajan

‘Too often, a kind of travel writing – especially the novel set abroad in an exotic locale – feels like a way of allegorizing and escaping problems at home.’

Since Everything Was Suddening Into A Hurricane

Binyavanga Wainaina

After a sudden stroke, Binyavanga Wainaina and his lover travel to Nairobi to reconcile with his father.