One night forty years ago Helen Cerruti left her husband. They were living together at the time with their two little girls on the top floor of a big Edwardian house, in a respectable street where the houses sat back behind well-tended gardens and knobbled lime trees with blotchy bark surged up like…
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.
‘Literature is that odd paradox: an artifice that somehow truthfully engages the reader, the mind, the emotions, the self, in essential communion.’
‘We had each needed the other for something, which wasn’t kindness or love. We’d both had dry husks for our hearts, that day.’
‘She wondered if she would have the audacity, when the time came, to let herself go like that.’
‘I’m miscarrying a pregnancy, she said, when the spasm seemed to have passed.—It’s a fine mess.’
‘She relished the thought of his rather ravaged fifty-five-year-old and oh-so-male head against her broderie anglaise pillowcases.‘
‘It’s a slow night again. The other valets are out back playing pétanque with the kitchen staff.’
