Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 152: Still Life
Summer 2020
‘After so many years of feeling that some Event was due, that something vast must surely happen, something vast happened. Is happening.’ from ‘Spring’ by China Miéville
This issue reflects on confinement, escape and paying attention, as writers and artists respond to the pandemic.
Cover © Leanne Shapton
From this Issue
|Granta 152
1 April 2020
Michael Hofmann
‘Living on money from the government, excused our duties and our liabilities, reducing our wants to eating and sleeping and what in the eighteenth century may have passed for exercise, the alderman’s stroll.’
|Granta 152
The Perfect Companion
Joanna Kavenna
‘She was so understanding, so interesting, such an intellectual. She was also a wristwatch, but this hardly mattered.’
|Granta 152
Secretions
Colin Herd
‘No I’m not tired I said. / No I’m not thirsty I said. / I’m sassy.’
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Still Life
Leanne Shapton
‘Because that’s what I’m doing a lot of; looking around the interiors I occupy, the corners of my occupied apartment.’
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Poem Written from Inside a Leather Pig Mask
Sam Sax
‘child who dreams of growing into / a swan only to wake in terror at a mouth / filled with feathers.’
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Golden Vulture
Jason Ockert
‘Last summer, the boy still believed in miracles. That’s why he disobeyed his father and crossed the bridge. He wondered, back then, if his mother might be over there.’
|Granta 152
Tête-à-Tête
Diana Matar
‘The features and expressions were uncannily contemporary. Some seemed to be mirror images of the people I had seen at the protest in Piazza del Gesù.’
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The Temptation of St Anthony
Mark Haddon
‘He had not eaten today nor had he drunk. He would wait until the craving had passed, then allow himself to do both when it became a choice, not a lost battle in his long war against the base needs of the body.’
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Yerevan, Armenia
Viken Berberian
‘Ever since the pandemic, our neighborhood is mostly deserted, except for the pigeons and statues.’
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Le Flottement
Janine di Giovanni
‘Their lives were halted in time, a predicament they accepted with grace, sometimes even with humor. They appeared to be floating.’
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Clementine, Carmelita, Dog
David Means
‘Here I should stress that dog memory is not at all like human memory, and that human memory, from a dog’s point of view, would seem strange, clunky, unnatural and deceptive.’
|Granta 152
Labirinto
Wiktoria Wojciechowska & Lisa Halliday
‘But only a city without people is immune. Only a city in which nothing circulates, nothing changes hands, nothing flourishes.’
Lisa Halliday introduces the photography of Wiktoria Wojciechowska.
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Daughter of Radium
Joe Dunthorne
‘As a child, my grandmother brushed her teeth every day with radioactive toothpaste.’
|Granta 152
Spring
China Miéville
‘That after so many years of feeling that some Event was due, that something vast must surely happen, something vast happened. Is happening.’
