The words ‘big family’ have the same ring for me as ‘savage tribe’, and I now know that every big family is savage in its own way.


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‘The words ‘big family’ have the same ring for me as 'savage tribe', and I now know that every big family is savage in its own way.’
The words ‘big family’ have the same ring for me as ‘savage tribe’, and I now know that every big family is savage in its own way.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘There was really no point in going to a bomb shelter just because the siren sounded. Our hotel was unlikely to be a target.’
Lindsey Hilsum writes letters home from Ukraine.
‘The recipe is a text that can produce spattering because it was spattering before it was language.’
Rebecca May Johnson on recipes, repetition and intimacy.
‘To make a subject of the very same entity I am a part of, to be outside and within it.’
Thomas Duffield photographs his family.
‘There sat the joy of the shopping centre, what I thought of as its secret heart. A white rabbit.’
A story by Dizz Tate.
‘We were ourselves migrating birds; in a sense, refugees, displaced persons, without a home or a home town.’
Volodymyr Rafeyenko (tr. Sasha Dugdale) on the war in Ukraine.
Paul Theroux is the author of around thirty novels and short story collections, as well as sixteen works of non-fiction. His latest book is A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta (2009).
More about the author →‘Playing a role gave him latitude and allowed him to overcome his reticence.’
‘Three figures came single file over a wooded hill of the Fells carrying their rifles one-handed and keeping their heads low. They were duckwalking, hunched like Indian trackers, with the same stealth in their footfall, toeing the mushy earth of early spring. I was one of them, the last, being careful, watching for the stranger, his black hat, his blue Studebaker. Walter Herkis and Chicky DePalma were the others. When we got to the clearing where the light slanted through the bare trees and into our squinting faces you could see we were twelve years old.’
‘He was such a darter he seldom stayed still long enough for anyone to sum him up.’
‘England does not have a climate; it has weather, seldom dramatic.’
Americans, speaking of foreign lands, often say, 'It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.'
‘Using the ‘we’ voice allowed me to tell a much larger story than I would have been able to tell otherwise.’
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