‘She acted as if her own desires magnetized the world, and when you were close to her, she magnetized your moral compass too.’
The outbuildings of his father’s farm looked stable enough to me, but then he gunned the engine and I had to grab hard at the rails beneath my seat as the speed pushed us back, and we lurched forwards, then down to the left. A brief glimpse of tarmac rushed past, and I clung on as the bike rocked …
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.
‘I asked where the path was to the rapids. He looked at me as if all his suspicions had been confirmed.’
‘What I needed was to gaze into the surface, and, by gazing, to pass into another world, and breathe.’
‘Every time I tried to write more, it turned out to be a fruitless endeavor – I felt like I was trapped in a sealed room with no windows.’
Fiction by Yu Hua, translated by Michael Berry.
‘They couldn’t put their finger on exactly what it was they craved, but they knew it was very different to what they had.’
Fiction by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes.
‘To step into a paternoster lift is to step into the circulatory system of a building, to become a part of its very structure.’
