‘When I was seventeen, a freshman in college living in my parents’ house, I met Ruth at a poetry reading.’
At Gregori’s, once you’ve paid your twenty dollars and checked your clothes and shoes with the friendly men in the antechamber to the left, you are given a mask – the small black kind, like Zorro’s. Stretch the elastic a little, you’re told, then slip the mask on carefully; there are only …
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
‘Behind every man I want to kiss lies that original desire, which it is my nature and my fate to displace.’
‘Does it make you a little ghostly yourself, when what’s gone is more present for you than what’s here?’
‘an orange plastic basket of compost / down from the top of the garden – sweet dark, / fibrous rot, promising’
Will Self and Mark Doty's discussion with Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing about blood, the surprising relationship between Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman and the nature of addiction.
