Grandfather, are you asleep?
–No.
–I asked you a question.


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‘Why should Switzerland of all places have no army? It costs billions and billions, but we can afford it.’
Grandfather, are you asleep?
–No.
–I asked you a question.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘She must have loved gold seeing that everything in the penthouse was gold. We didn’t sit. Fear didn’t let us see where to sit.’ A story by Adachioma Ezeano.
‘I had also, a week earlier, been fired for trying to sleep with my boss’s husband. I got the idea from a book, or maybe every book.’ A story by Emily Adrian.
‘The Mitsubishi conglomerate controls a forty per cent share of the world market in bluefin tuna; they are freezing and hoarding huge stocks of the fish every year.’ Katherine Rundell on extinction speculation.
‘Two roof tiles are missing to the rear: the kiss of death. Without repair, ruination is now inevitable. Until then, this is my best hope of shelter.’ Cal Flyn visits the island of Swona in northern Scotland.
‘I’m on the cliff of myself & these aren’t wings, they’re futures. / For as long as I can remember my body was a small town nightmare.’ A poem by Ocean Vuong.
Max Frisch published his first book in 1940. ‘Switzerland Without an Army?’ (Granta 35) was first published in German as a pamphlet around the time of the Swiss referendum to abolish the military. The referendum was defeated by a vote of 1,903,797 (64,4 per cent).
More about the author →Michael Bullock was a British novelist, poet and translator. He translated many literary works of French and German into English. He died in 2008.
More about the translator →
‘By the time I was in my teens, I had taken up an existence framed by a double negative: not male, not white.’
An excerpt from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s essay collection, Black and Female.
‘Traditional hand-craft becomes literary practice; becomes critical theory.’
Preti Taneja on intertextuality.
‘We live with the permanent sense of imminent disaster.’
Charif Majdalani on the situation in Beirut. Translated from the French by Ruth Diver.
An excerpt from Federico Falco’s story collection A Perfect Cemetery.
‘a powerful blast ignited in their latest attempt to grow lives in the dirt of your online receipt, human blood carries all kinds of filigreed debris’
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