Bo Diddley with the Bo-ettes, and the Duchess (right) on rhythm guitar, Los Angeles, 1965


Sign in to Granta.com.
‘There’s Bo Diddley. Big hips, pointy shoes, glasses. A gap between his teeth, and a bow tie, in 1965.’
Bo Diddley with the Bo-ettes, and the Duchess (right) on rhythm guitar, Los Angeles, 1965
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel.’
Rebecca May Johnson negotiates allotment culture.
‘Globalisation is incomplete: money can go anywhere, but laws cannot.’
Oliver Bullough on one of Britain’s most contested outposts: the British Virgin Islands.
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
A new story from Lydia Davis.
‘She began to count; it was easier this way, counting, because she would not have to remember how she felt.’
An excerpt from Ukamaka Olisakwe’s Ogadinma.
‘Like any desert, I learn myself by what’s desired of me—
and I am demoned by those desires.’
From Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz.
Ben Ratliff has been a pop and jazz critic at the New York Times since 1996. His most recent book is The Jazz Ear: Conversations over Music (Times Books).
More about the author →‘This makes more sense to me as a bodily practice: that desire to push one’s physical limits well beyond their natural bounds.’
‘I was trying simultaneously to numb the grief I felt and to burrow into that grief, so I could stand in it.’
‘After a while people’s faces began to fade, and they came to seem like hoards of noppera-bō, faceless spirits gliding by.’
Two stories by Tomoka Shibasaki.
Margaret Busby was Britain’s first Black woman publisher. At the age of twenty, she was also one of its youngest.
‘My work life – like, maybe, yours – is built around another, non-paying vocation.’
‘The Easter Parade is winding down, when I spot Him. Her. Them. The Apparition.’
The copyright to all contents of this site is held either by Granta or by the individual authors, and none of the material may be used elsewhere without written permission. For reprint enquiries, contact us.