One day, not long after he turned thirteen, Adam ran away from home. He woke up that morning and decided he would look for his mother.
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One day, not long after he turned thirteen, Adam ran away from home. He woke up that morning and decided he would look for his mother.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
Tash Aw is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, which have won the Whitbread First Novel Award, a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He is also the author of the memoir The Face: Strangers on a Pier, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He was recently the Judith Ginsberg Fellow at the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris. His latest novel, We, The Survivors, was published in 2019.
Photograph © Stacey Liu
‘We were trapped in a sort of double prison: by poverty in Europe, and by China and its expectations of us.’
‘Where wealth and technology go, culture quickly follows, and soon it became acceptable, even desirable, to express an interest in Japan beyond the mere practicality offered by its products.’
‘It was as if he was consciously trying to fashion an image for what he wanted the country to be: ultra-confident and unapologetic, not just severing all links with our colonial past but sticking a bold middle finger up to it while we strode chest-out into the future.’
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘One did not have high hopes for Gettysburg. Nor for Pennsylvania in general. Having grown up in Indiana, Diana felt she’d earned her condescension.’
Fiction by Jessi Jezewska Stevens.
‘This story could be about any one of those people, but it is about Rayme and comes to no conclusions.’
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