‘She is standing there, her body like a lamp, waiting for the glass to break.’
Her hostess is Mrs Edith Nyathi, who introduces herself as a widow and retired matron of Frere Hospital. She never stops talking about her ‘second life’. She raises her eyebrows and drops her head forward when pronouncing the phrase. The guest house is her pension, she says, ‘my little egg’….
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.
‘In rapidly transforming societies, writers may lose the space they’ve built their imaginative lives around.’
‘The old romantic warning not to trust a machine more than one’s own intuition has renewed urgency in the digital age.’
Photography by Salvatore Vitale, introduced by Granta.
‘Fifty years I’ve played here, except for stretches in Arizona and Mississippi, after my divorce.’
Fiction by Kate Lister Campbell.
‘The past is no longer behind me but in front.’
An extract from About Ed by Robert Glück.
‘Four Organs allows us to step out of time and briefly inhabit infinity.’
Maartje Scheltens on Steve Reich, repetition and discomfort.
‘My da, I say, is the famous Wullie Collins. He's the Robin Hood of Scotland. He takes from the rich and gives money to the poor. My da’s a bank robber.’
