‘In the imagination of strangers there is a small town in America which represents not just itself but the whole country‘.
In the imagination of strangers there is a small town in America which represents not just itself but the whole country. It will have a strip mall and a high school band and a Pancake Day in the fall. It will be known on its Chamber of Commerce website as America’s Hometown.
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.
‘As many as thirty-five states in the world are thought to have the capacity (if not the wish) to build a nuclear weapon.’
‘My first sight of modern Iraq was a colossal fairy-lit head of Saddam Hussein hurtling out of the darkness, as if from another galaxy of despotism and violence.’
‘I see in an instant what has brought people to the valley for four centuries.’
’In my inferno of solitude, I thought there must be some reason why I was doing what I was doing.‘
‘At a time when China has become a unifying specter of menace for Western governments, this issue of Granta brings the country’s literary culture into focus.’
The editor introduces the issue.
‘These days the tempest of Taliban violence ripping across the frontier has shaken Peshawar to its core.’
