I shall miss you so much when I am dead
For copyright reasons this poem is unavailable online. To read Harold Pinter’s ‘Poem (To A)’, purchase Granta 100.
I shall miss you so much when I am dead
For copyright reasons this poem is unavailable online. To read Harold Pinter’s ‘Poem (To A)’, purchase Granta 100.
‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
Harold Pinter was born in London in 1930 and was married to Antonia Fraser. He was the author of twenty-nine plays, twenty-one screenplays and directed twenty-seven theatre productions, including James Joyce’s Exiles, David Mamet’s Oleanna and seven plays by Simon Gray. His awards included the Companion of Honour for services to Literature and the Molière d’honneur for lifetime achievement. In 2005, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died on Christmas Eve, 2008.
More about the author →‘Shakespeare writes of the open wound and, through him, we know it open and know it closed. We tell when it ceases to beat and tell it at its highest peak of fever‘, Harold Pinter in 'A Note on Shakespeare' in Granta 59: France: The Outsider.
‘Words only point to experience, they can’t replace it.’
Vanessa Onwuemezi and Colin Herd discuss UFOs, relation, and the search for an inner sense of home.
‘We all knew that about the gods – that they were total sex.’
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