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← Back to all issuesGranta 151: Membranes
Spring 2020
Membranes are porous biological interfaces that regulate flows between one zone and another, allowing some substances to pass and blocking others. This issue, guest-edited by award-winning writer Rana Dasgupta, is devoted to currents of all kinds, and to the barriers that check them.
Cover design © Tom Etherington
From this Issue
|Granta 151
Secondhand
Mónica de la Torre
‘Eerily animated, it’s as if the gloves persist in their attempt to express something that can’t be reduced to words, something untranslatable.’
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Hair
Mahreen Sohail
‘The first person he tells is his girlfriend of one year. I’m going to donate my hair to my mother, he says, and is worried to see tears rise in her eyes.’
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Snap
Anouchka Grose
‘What a strange, terrible, exciting present – something you have to defile in order to appreciate.’
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You Are Here, You Are Not a Ghost
Mark Doty
‘Does it make you a little ghostly yourself, when what’s gone is more present for you than what’s here?’
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Diminishing Returns
Fatin Abbas
‘Alex had been sent to this remote district between north and south Sudan to update maps. It was an information-gathering project run by an American NGO based in the capital, Khartoum, nine hundred kilometers to the north.’
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Border Documents
Arturo Soto
‘The twin cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez lie either side of the US–Mexico border.’
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The Lake
Kapka Kassabova
‘The chalky mountain separates the lake from its higher, non-identical twin, but only overground. Underground, they are connected. Ohrid and Prespa: two lakes, one ecosystem.’
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Between Light and Storm
Esther Woolfson
‘We’ve always been entwined in life and in death with other creatures, although often too much time has elapsed to be able to interpret with any certainty what some of these symbols and artefacts mean.’
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All Species Have the Same Life
Emanuele Coccia
‘I have in me the vestiges of an endless series of living beings, all born of other living beings.’
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Clarity
Ruchir Joshi
‘I was close to my own father, which many people are not.’
Ruchir Joshi remembers his son.
