‘The message that vegetarianism imparts to the rest of us is ascetic and exclusive.’
The butcher’s shop on Bloor Street in Toronto has closed down. Its owner may simply be embracing a well-deserved retirement–but it is also possible that, situated as his store was in a downtown neighbourhood full of young middle-class families, he had been losing business.
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.
‘Patterns in my love life, things I read, my dreams and distant memories together wove plush carpets of significance.’
An essay by Thom Sliwowski on chicken, abstinence and polyamory.
‘Ask anyone in Ayodhya, and they will say the city’s Hindu–Muslim harmony can withstand any test.’
Snigdha Poonam on the construction of a Hindu temple on the ruins of a mosque in Utter Pradesh.
‘I should warn you, she said, ketchup on her chin, on the back of her hand. I like to have sex a lot.’
Fiction by Kathy Stevens.
‘Desire charges the landscape with physical upheaval. We become water, weather. And why not? Why describe a character by the hat she is wearing instead of her experience of orgasm?’
Robert Glück and K Patrick on writing desire.
‘What does that mean, vegan cheese? asks a lady who’d had no query about amuse-bouche.’
An extract from The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes.
‘It was / a line that signaled absolute forgetting / and it made me want to weep into my drink’
