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Danez Smith and Kaveh Akbar In Conversation
Danez Smith & Kaveh Akbar
Danez Smith and Kaveh Akbar share sublime food experiences, discuss their latest collections and ask one another how best to bring community into poetry.
Breasts: A History
Krys Malcolm Belc
‘My breasts are shrinking. As my fat redistributes it settles in my belly and leaves my chest.’
Now, Now, Louison
Jean Frémon
Jean Frémon on the artist Louise Bourgeois and her fascination with spiders. Translated from the French by Cole Swensen.
The Poker
Kathryn Scanlan
‘I looked back and there was something wrong about his hand – how it cupped her bottom, how it probed.’
Cassiopeia (three back-to-front songs)
Diana Anphimiadi
‘Anyway, I did not die. / I lined the sky, inside-out.’ Translated from the Georgian by Jean Sprackland and Natalia Bukia-Peters.
Parfait
Hiromi Kawakami
‘He comes all the way here after he died and the two of you are making small talk?’ New fiction by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell
Masculinity Is Leaving The Male Body
Seabright D. Mortimer
‘If we’re gonna imagine this beautiful queer paradise what form does a man take?’ – Seabright D. Mortimer on constructing masculine identity in genderqueer spaces.
Of Donuts I Have Loved
Miranda Dennis
‘Krispy Kremes melt at the touch, are tender and loving, are used by my family to perform a wholeness we do not always feel’
Paul Dalla Rosa | Notes on Craft
Paul Dalla Rosa
‘I feel like I’m haunting an empty building, inert, waiting for each room to burst into flames.’
The Restaurant of Many Orders
Kenji Miyazawa
‘Two young gentlemen dressed just like British military men, with gleaming guns on their shoulders and two dogs like great white bears at their heels, were walking in the mountains where the leaves rustled dry underfoot.’
Slum Wolf
Tadao Tsuge
‘It was a red-light district and a plywood market and a town of hoodlums in one. I’ll add one more thing: The whole place stunk of sewage.’
After
April Ayers Lawson
‘I again told him I wasn’t ready to have sex, and his only response was to lean in and kiss me. The hallway in which we walked seemed to be shrinking, closing in on us.’ – April Ayers Lawson on intimacy after sexual abuse.
Every Day Was Ordinary
Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
‘A life is an open thing / leaking out into / the air around it.’
Hot Rain
Terese Svoboda
A new story from Terese Svoboda about love, money and power in the hands of an aging parent.
A Few Words about Fake Breasts
Nell Boeschenstein
‘You repeat this over and over. You pinch your nipples harder. Then harder and harder still. You twist them. You dare them to say Mercy. You stare into your own eyes that are watching you from the mirror.’
A Summer of Japanese Literature
Dan Bradley
From manga to crime fiction, contemporary literature to Nobel-Prize-winning classics, here are ten works of Japanese literature worth spending your summer on
How Much Heart
Mieko Kawakami
A triptych of flash fiction by Mieko Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by David Boyd.
Murasaki’s Paper Trail
Martin Puchner
Martin Puchner on how Murasaki Shikibu, a lady-in-waiting at the Japanese court, manage to write the first great novel of world literature.
Fred Pearce | Notes on Craft
Fred Pearce
‘For a hack like me, book-length meta-journalism is both a luxury and a challenge. I cannot hide my own views over 100,000 words, even if I want to.’
Introduction
Sigrid Rausing
Editor and publisher Sigrid Rausing introduces Granta 144: genericlovestory.
I Bite My Friends
Fernanda Eberstadt
‘The Easter Parade is winding down, when I spot Him. Her. Them. The Apparition.’
Women Talking
Miriam Toews
‘When we have liberated ourselves, we will have to ask ourselves who we are.’
On Paris Hilton and Other Undead Things
Brittany Newell
‘What sex tapes offer, on a hauntological level, is an impossible closeness to that which is neither dead nor alive.’
Though I Have Never Been to Ostia, I Have Seen the Place Where Our Dreams Died
Momtaza Mehri
‘like pasolini’s dream of an african oresteia let us be ridiculous’
Telling My Story
Stella Duffy
‘I wonder if they could all smell the queer on me, the queer in me, the burgeoning sexuality that I had no words for at the time.’
Cross-Dressers
Sébastien Lifshitz & Andrew McMillan
‘These images appear to give a glimpse of a ghost-self, a photographic negative of the heart.’ Andrew McMillan introduces photography curated by Sébastien Lifshitz.
Normal People
Sally Rooney
‘After the first time they had sex, Marianne stayed the night in his house.’ New fiction from Sally Rooney.
Comme
Paul Dalla Rosa
‘Because I spent a large amount of time convincing people to buy clothing they would never actually wear, it was easy to convince myself the same.’
I’ve Seen the Future, Baby; It Is Murder
Tara Isabella Burton
‘It was not very comfortable, but the appeal of it was that we did not like each other.’
Zeus
Fiona Benson
‘days I talked with Zeus / I ate only ice / felt the blood trouble and burn / under my skin’
Abscessed Tooth
Debra Gwartney
‘Silence allows me to pretend that this happened to someone else a long time ago, and not to me.’
Chameleon
Tomoko Sawada & Sayaka Murata
‘If Sawada can transform herself without limit, maybe I can too.’ Sayaka Murata introduces Tomoko Sawada’s photographs, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
