‘Television is constantly accused of encouraging apathy, sloth, passivity, illiteracy, mindlessness and docility among those who are addicted to watching it.’
Television is constantly accused of encouraging apathy, sloth, passivity, illiteracy, mindlessness and docility among those who are addicted to watching it. But no one seems to have noticed the effects of television on those who have been denied access to it, in all its global variety and vulgarity….
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘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.
‘My childhood was spent in Kimberley, the diamond-mining town in South Africa.In those years most of the mines were no longer being worked’.
A journalist receives a troubling call about a friend in this excerpt from Madeleine Bunting’s new novel Ceremony of Innocence.
‘Pictures from some cities in Latin America: the burning in front of the family home of the dead who are not collected by the state.’
A coronavirus diary from the Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares, translated by Daniel Hahn.
‘He was thirteen years old or just about and newly an only child. Newly not a child.’
‘Nobody wanted to hear / about the rain or its father / or leviathan slicing the deeps / at the black edge of the world / under the cold blue light of the Pleiades.’
