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.
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
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.’
‘There was very little I could do in life except get dressed, smoke the correct cigarettes.’
An extract from Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery.
‘I used to be ashamed of it, though I’m not sure what exactly felt shameful.’
On training to be an opera singer.
‘Maud tries to understand how her role is being rewritten on the spot – who the woman might be.’
‘It was small and delicate and its song was simple but sweet – the perfect gift. The perfect offering.’
Fiction by Hana Gammon.
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