On the way to the cricket fight, Mr Wu slipped us a piece of paper. It looked like a shopping list. ‘More numbers,’ said Michael, my translator. He read:
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On the way to the cricket fight, Mr Wu slipped us a piece of paper. It looked like a shopping list. ‘More numbers,’ said Michael, my translator. He read:
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.
Hugh Raffles lives in New York where he teaches at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of In Amazonia: A Natural History. ‘Cricket Fighting’, published in Granta 98, is taken from his latest book, The Illustrated Insectopedia, which was published by Pantheon in 2009.
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‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘A should probably write that it hit uz like a smack in the guts, or the red mist cem down or sumet like that, but in all honesty, a can just remember feelen upset.’
New fiction by Shaun Wilson.
‘Winning, it turns out, was the cracking whip that meant gamblers had to stay where they were until they lost their money all over again.’
Marina Benjamin on losing.
‘Before chintziness there was chintz, a fabric produced in India and imported to Europe by colonial traders.’
Sam Johnson-Schlee on what chintz means.
‘We claimed the places that were theirs and they were forced to take refuge on what we left behind.’
An excerpt from In Search of One Last Song.
‘During an interrogation speech glows hot in the mouth, and what is spoken freezes.’
Herta Müller on language. Translated from the German by Philip Boehm.
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