Photograph courtesy of the authors
‘Four Syrian Borders’ is product of a joint collaboration between Granta and the International Literary Showcase, an initiative supported by Writers’ Centre Norwich, the British Council and Arts Council England.
‘The landscape, glimpsed through plumes of dust thrown up by trucks, grew drier, more hostile as it climbed away from the sea.’
Photograph courtesy of the authors
‘Four Syrian Borders’ is product of a joint collaboration between Granta and the International Literary Showcase, an initiative supported by Writers’ Centre Norwich, the British Council and Arts Council England.
‘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.
Esa Aldegheri is an academic and activist working in the field of migration and integration. She speaks five languages, is a researcher at the University of Glasgow and Chair of Edinburgh City of Sanctuary. @aldeghesa
More about the author →Gavin Francis is a physician in Edinburgh and the award-winning author of Empire Antarctica, Adventures in Human Being and Shapeshifters. He's a regular contributor to the Guardian, LRB and the New York Review of Books. www.gavinfrancis.com @gavinfranc
More about the author →
‘Something slightly odd united us at times: a form of cruelty.’
Fiction by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson.
‘you dreamt of the CUNY / Graduate Center library / on fire, you dove in to save Stalin’s / copy of Capital’
Poetry by Kay Gabriel.
‘He saw himself as nothing more than a man holding a pen.’
Paula Fourie remembers her husband, Athol Fugard.
‘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.
Tamburi sits in the shadow of one of Europe’s largest steel plants. The pollution is giving the locals cancer.
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