‘It just seemed like the right thing to want, the right thing to do.’
My parents wake me up, both of them together in the doorway of my room, their faces wrinkled by concern and slightly shiny because of the sunlight streaming through the windows.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
‘Something slightly odd united us at times: a form of cruelty.’
Fiction by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson.
‘The material becomes a fable about Los Angeles, a city that is always watching itself watch itself.’
Jesse Barron on Los Angeles and Gary Indiana’s final novel.
‘Dead friends come to us unbidden – in unexpected moments, in dreams. They remain in conversation. In these pages, writers have transmitted the flickering aura of their departed friends.’
The editor introduces the issue.
‘On 7 December 1976, I finally succeeded in pestering my parents into introducing me to Andy Warhol.’
Fernanda Eberstadt on her friendship with Andy Warhol.
‘Of course your head would get muddled with the other person’s at the end. It was just the practical side of “for better or for worse”. That was friendship so much more than marriage.’
Fiction by Susie Boyt.
‘Will it be for them / as it was for us, impossible to imagine oceans where there are now / mountains?’
