They lived in London at the end of the nineteen eighties. His wife was twenty-four. He was twenty-six. In her job, she earned eleven thousand pounds a year, and he earned thirteen thousand pounds a year.
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They lived in London at the end of the nineteen eighties. His wife was twenty-four. He was twenty-six. In her job, she earned eleven thousand pounds a year, and he earned thirteen thousand pounds a year.
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.
Philip Hensher was born in south London, where he still lives. He was educated at Oxford and at Cambridge, where his doctorate was on eighteenth-century English painting, and worked for six years as a clerk in the House of Commons. His novels are Other Lulus (1994), Kitchen Venom (1996), which won a Somerset Maugham Award, Pleasured (1998), The Mulberry Empire (2002) and The Northern Clemency (2008). His short stories are collected as The Bedroom of the Mister’s Wife (1999). In addition he wrote the libretto for Thomas Adès’s opera, Powder Her Face.
More about the author →‘I liked his humourless intelligence, so redundant and so excessive in an MP.’
‘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.
‘Fiction is a kind of spell, I said, and analysing a story is an exorcism. It loses all its mystery.’
Fiction by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang.
Ian Leslie on Barack Obama's election in 2008 and forthcoming administration.
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