The abortion took five hours. Their appointment was for two o’clock, and they left at seven.
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‘Olga was noble. She was Amazonian. She felt exhausted and humiliated, but she also had force.’
The abortion took five hours. Their appointment was for two o’clock, and they left at seven.
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‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. He is the author of the novels Politics and The Escape, and Kapow!, a novella, as well as a book of international novels, which won a Somerset Maugham award. His work has been translated into 30 languages.
More about the author →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.
‘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.’
‘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.’
‘Of course your head would get muddled with the other person’s at the end. It was just the practical side of “for better or for worse”. That was friendship so much more than marriage.’
Fiction by Susie Boyt.
‘Through college she had been a feminist – more or less. She shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.’
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