The Meat Suit
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Possession
Bella Pollen
‘The brain is a bureaucratic organ with an almost neurotic determination to balance its books. To account to the department of logic for terror, it calls on the office of imagination to conjure up a worthy vision.’
Open Water
Deb Olin Unferth
She had already imagined it all, so much so that when she finally did see him, she felt unable to speak.
About Her and the Memories That Belong to Her
Mieko Kawakami
‘If I were to forget, then it would be the same as it never having existed at all.’
To Rio de Janeiro
Gonçalo M. Tavares
‘In the end, what one understands in Rio de Janeiro is that joy is the only coherence of a living being.’
To Detroit
Benjamin Markovits
‘Things started going wrong at my ten-year college reunion – or I guess I mean that I realized how wrong they had gone.’
A Thousand Splendid Stuns
Morwari Zafar
‘More important than anything else that fateful year was the life-defining transcendence of Peter Gabriel.’
1964
Robin Robertson
Under the gritted lid of winter, each ice-puddle’s broken plate cracked to a star. The...
Two Poems
Jack Underwood
‘We are nearing the conclusion of this anatomy. / We are strung between the point of ending, and / the point of having started.’
To Zagreb
Yoko Tawada
‘You didn’t know where you wanted to end up, had never considered how much time you had left.’
Poor Lucky Kolyvanova
Ludmila Ulitskaya
‘The red girls’ school stood opposite a grey boys’ school, built five years after it as if to proclaim the rational symmetry of the world.’
Five Things Right Now: Caroline Lucas
Caroline Lucas
Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP and author of Honorable Friends?, shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about.
A Woman’s Worth
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan on the evolution of feminist judgments in India.
A Numbered Graph That Shows How Each Part of the Body Would Fit Into A Chair
Mary Jo Bang
‘It’s a simple truth that one can occupy two / places at one time while sitting in a chair—the same way a / poseable doll can be divided from her dress.’
In Conversation: Pankaj Mishra and Aman Sethi
Pankaj Mishra & Aman Sethi
‘It is India’s turn to undergo social traumas that other countries have suffered in their pursuit of wealth and power.’
From The Abstract Humanities
Sandra Simonds
‘let us / build the openwork fabric of our garden / on the fear in the body’
Numb
Lauren Schenkman
‘She felt things under the skin: scars where the body had torn during childbirth, clumps of cellulite, lobules and ducts.’
Every Person’s Little Treasure
Liliana Heker
‘It occurred to Ana that this was a woman who often left things hanging.’
Five Things Right Now: Valeria Luiselli
Valeria Luiselli
Valeria Luiselli, published her most recent novel, The Story of My Teeth, last month. She shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.
Light
Lesley Nneka Arimah
‘When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters.’ 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize – regional winner for Africa.
Famished Eels
Mary Rokonadravu
‘After one hundred years, this is what I have: a daguerreotype of her in bridal finery; a few stories told and retold in plantations, kitchens, hospitals, airport lounges.’
Introduction
Sigrid Rausing
‘The pieces in this issue of Granta are all concerned, in one way or another, with the difference between the world as we see it and the world as it actually is, beyond our faulty memories and tired understanding.’
The Gentlest Village
Jesse Ball
‘You are learning – learning a great deal. It is too much for you, so your body bows out. Then you wake up and you can continue.’
Life and Breasts
Ludmila Ulitskaya
‘Death is here, by our side, and we can make no witty Nabokovian jokes about it.’
Dreamed in Stone
Jon Fosse
‘You were a chasm that cracked and turned into stones, and then the stones lay there, beautifully laid, in a wall.’
Her Lousy Shoes
Tracy O’Neill
‘On good days, he could believe that that was exactly what he appeared to be: pedestrian, a pedestrian, a walker, walking, going places, on the ups, possessing two healthy feet at least.’
It was discovered that gut bacteria were responsible
Kathryn Maris
‘this dream that might have been pleasant for an / 8-year-old could instead emerge as a nightmare for a woman / on the brink of menopause’
The Florida Motel
Kevin Canty
‘Suddenly she understood what she was doing here. She was among strangers, the place where Bill had chosen to spend his life.’
Traces II
Ian Teh
‘I am interested in the dissonance created between the ambivalent images and the historical, economic and scientific narrative that accompanies them.’
