‘Looking back on it now, I don't think I was ever actually 'sex shy' (to use one of Prok's pet phrases), but I'll admit I was pretty naive when I first came to him, not to mention hopelessly dull and conventional.’
Looking back on it now, I don’t think I was ever actually ‘sex shy’ (to use one of Prok’s pet phrases), but I’ll admit I was pretty naive when I first came to him, not to mention hopelessly dull and conventional. I don’t know what he saw in me, really – or perhaps I do. If you’ll for…
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.
‘All he wanted was a quarter, fifty cents, a dollar maybe. The guy was a soft touch, absolutely–the softest.’
‘It was like floating untethered, drifting with the clouds, like being cupped in the hands of God.’
‘This statue, alone among all the myriad three-foot-high snotgreen likenesses of the Virgin cast in plaster by Finbarr Finnegan & Sons, Cork City, was seen one grim March afternoon some years back to move its limbs ever so slightly, as if seized suddenly by the need of a good sinew-cracking stretch.’
‘I contemplated the car. It lay there like a wreck along the highway, like a steel sculpture left over from a vanished civilization.’
‘At an age when most young Scotsmen were lifting skirts, ploughing furrows and spreading seed, Mungo Park was displaying his bare buttocks to al-haff Ali Ibn Fatoudi, Emir of Ludamar.’
‘The point of lucid death,’ he said, ‘is to retain the consciousness of dying, while blunting the agony of it.’
