As soon as I walked in, I knew he wanted to touch it. It was a small lift, just a box on a rope really. You could hear the churning of the wheel high above, and the whole thing creaked as it wound you up through the building.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘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.
‘The year I'm talking about, the year my sister left (or whatever you choose to call it), I was twenty-one and she was seventeen’.
‘The camera records what’s in front of it, but that reality can be pre-arranged.’
Thomas Ruff speaks to Alice Zoo about light, Bernd and Hilla Becher and the essence of photography.
‘The scarlet stained my palm – / whether the blood of the berry or of the bird, / I couldn’t tell.’
A poem by Isabelle Baafi.
‘The farm was in one of the fourteen green-purple wet deserts, in a dent six miles wide with its shoulders covered in scree and a rainy season that lasts twelve months a year.’
An extract from The Borrowed Hills by Scott Preston.
‘In Chicago and London the men who had never been to Amin’s Uganda already knew what they thought. An eye-witness account only served to confuse them.’
