‘It really wasn’t normal for me to wake up and not know how I got there. A normal pastime for me was to be intent on mathematical problems, or models of voting patterns in different democratic states.’
When I woke I was looking upside down at a line of velvet paintings on the wall above the bed. Jesus was standing on his halo beside a very bright Madonna – I mean the religious kind, not the disco version. In between the two of them was a tropicana beach – it was a palm tree, a palm tree, a pal…
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.
Adam Thirlwell speaks to Granta’s Yuka Igarashi about sex, history, translation, using tempo in novels and how his writing has evolved over the past decade.
‘The thing I really love about this story is how it manages its matryoshka feat – to be at once a free floating meditation, leaping like some street cat from wall to wall, while also going deeper and deeper into a single theme.’
‘I suppose it’s that word hyper that I was after: I was trying to find a form for a kind of hyper energy or anxiety.’
‘Olga was noble. She was Amazonian. She felt exhausted and humiliated, but she also had force.’
‘The script of script production rather followed the script of sex: it was intimate, exciting, boundary-crossing, and left the participants changed.’
Susan Pedersen on paranormal love in the Balfour family.
‘I was told I was not a feminist and never could be, because I was a man.’
