‘The court had given me six months to prove I was a responsible adult and a fit mother’.
The court had given me six months to prove I was a responsible adult and a fit mother. ‘But how am I supposed to do that?’ I wanted to know. ‘How am I supposed to prove I’m any kind of mother if they take Luke away?’ ‘Catch-22,’ Billy said, like that explained it. Billy was no help. Lu…
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‘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.
‘Some of the wisest things friends have said to me have been over text! But it’s a different kind of thinking.’
‘Outside, a technicolour sunset is giving way to the silvery sweep of searchlights, as a hand tugs the blackout curtain across the sky.’
‘At a time when China has become a unifying specter of menace for Western governments, this issue of Granta brings the country’s literary culture into focus.’
The editor introduces the issue.
‘Fiction is a kind of spell, I said, and analysing a story is an exorcism. It loses all its mystery.’
Fiction by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang.
‘Lu Dong is a fifth-rate actor – that’s by his own ranking system.’
Fiction by Shuang Xuetao, translated by Jeremy Tiang.
‘Cover your nose and mouth, the order came, swift and useless; if they’d had their turbans they would have wound them around their faces but there were only the balaclavas.’
