You won’t know me, won’t see my face. Unless you see my face. And then it will be too late.


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‘You won't know me, won't see my face. Unless you see my face. And then it will be too late.’
You won’t know me, won’t see my face. Unless you see my face. And then it will be too late.
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.
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is also the recipient of the 2005 Prix Femina for The Falls. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and she has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
More about the author →‘They were two sisters of youthful middle age with three breasts between them and a history that might be summed up as much left unsaid. Maggie, the elder, who'd had a mastectomy eighteen months before, rarely alluded to the fact in her younger sister's company and spoke with an air of startled reproach if Esther brought up the subject of her health; as if Maggie's breast cancer were a symptom of a moral weakness, a deficiency of character, about which Esther had no right to know.’
‘The livingness of the rifle and the bullet and the death spasm and his own bright quickening blood: never would he forget.’
‘Maud tries to understand how her role is being rewritten on the spot – who the woman might be.’
‘They learned that some people are born luckier than others and that things in this world do not always go as you plan.’
‘I went through a period of several years when everything I touched turned to failure.’
‘I don’t want to make suffering a positive (or negative); I very much want to acknowledge it without judgment.’
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