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.
‘She must have loved gold seeing that everything in the penthouse was gold. We didn’t sit. Fear didn’t let us see where to sit.’ A story by Adachioma Ezeano.
‘I had also, a week earlier, been fired for trying to sleep with my boss’s husband. I got the idea from a book, or maybe every book.’ A story by Emily Adrian.
‘The Mitsubishi conglomerate controls a forty per cent share of the world market in bluefin tuna; they are freezing and hoarding huge stocks of the fish every year.’ Katherine Rundell on extinction speculation.
‘Two roof tiles are missing to the rear: the kiss of death. Without repair, ruination is now inevitable. Until then, this is my best hope of shelter.’ Cal Flyn visits the island of Swona in northern Scotland.
‘I’m on the cliff of myself & these aren’t wings, they’re futures. / For as long as I can remember my body was a small town nightmare.’ A poem by Ocean Vuong.
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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‘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.
‘Katherine Mansfield has just stolen my chance to begin a conversation.’
Fiction by Eudris Planche Savón, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
‘She who says knockout, who says tap-out, speaks the words of glory.’
Fiction by Cristina Morales, translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn.
‘Two years earlier, as the rest of the world looked on, half-amused, half-impressed by this anachronistic twitch of the imperial lion's tail, a large British naval armada sailed south to recover the Falkland Islands by force of arms.’
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