But not the worst thing than can happen.


Sign in to Granta.com.
‘I’m the one who got away, the one you don’t know; I’m the long hairs you find under your pillow, nested in your drain, tangled in your brush.’
But not the worst thing than can happen.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘There’s this paradoxical nostalgia where even though yi suffered, yi miss it.’
Memoir by Graeme Armstrong.
‘She boils her sentences down to high-sucrose sweeties and calibrates her tone for maximum engagement.’
Fiction by Natasha Brown.
‘The monstrous years of my late teens lay lined up alongside the rest of my life like bullets in a gun.’
A story by Sophie Mackintosh.
‘Without waiting for me she removes her white shirt. Each button a piece of my own spine, undone.’
Fiction by K Patrick.
‘I followed him onto the dancefloor and he put his hands on my hips as if he’d known me for at least an hour.’
Fiction by Saba Sams.
Melanie Rae Thon was born in 1957 in Kalispell, Montana. She graduated from the universities of Michigan and Boston, and has lived in Arizona and New York, where she taught in the graduate creative writing program at Syracuse University. She has published three novels, Meteors in August (1990), lona Moon (1993), and Sweet Hearts (2001), and two short story collections, Girls in the Grass (1991) and First, Body (1997). In 1996 she was named as one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists, and she has twice been a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is currently professor of English at the University of Utah.
More about the author →‘You see that the only thing that seems to move in its atmosphere is dust suspended against a fine thread of sunlight, that time itself sleeps lazily on the stupefied clocks.’
‘it’s wrong / to let delicacies, even when suspect, go untried’
A poem by Natalie Shapero.
‘It was small and delicate and its song was simple but sweet – the perfect gift. The perfect offering.’
Fiction by Hana Gammon.
‘Places don’t always remember what they are.’
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo talks about her novel When We Were Birds.
‘No one goes unpunished. They’re men of cattle and blood.’
An extract from Of Cattle and Men by Ana Paula Maia, translated by Zoë Perry.
‘The song, the voice, and the heat; men on their knees, heads in hands, sobbing and now howling.’
The copyright to all contents of this site is held either by Granta or by the individual authors, and none of the material may be used elsewhere without written permission. For reprint enquiries, contact us.