‘I turn to O’Connor’s music when I get tired of lying to myself. Her songs are allegorical free-falls. Spiritual chiaroscuros, even.’ Momtaza Mehri on Sinéad O’Connor. The post Universal Mother appeared first on Granta ..read more

I loved the anonymous chat app. I downloaded it on my computer. I downloaded it on my phone. I was lonely, and the anonymous chat app made me less lonely. I couldn’t sleep, and the anonymous chat app said, Who cares! When I felt helpless, when I despaired, when my breath caught horribly in my chest, the anonymous chat app told me: The whole world suffers. Everyone is unemployed. The whole world is sexless inside of its body. The whole world longs for sleep. When it sleeps, the whole world has terrible nightmares. And when it wakes, the whole world is so, so grateful for the opportunity to chat ..read more

You see someone at the edge of a gathering. The desire is simple and immediate. Your glance feels returned. Have I seen this person before? An unfathomable series of impressions – yours and those of others you have absorbed – have led here. But the pressure feels specific. Where did this need come from that moves through you? A question perhaps best left unanswered; there may be no surer way of losing desire than trying to understand it. The figure approaches. You exchange pleasantries. Beyond the facts, you offer each other impressions. Nothing but impressions all the way down. Years pass. T ..read more

document.addEventListener('copy', function(e) { e.preventDefault(); }); }); I His name is José Eduardo but his friends know him as Pepe. He lives with his mother in a comfortable old apartment in Madrid’s Barrio de Salamanca. He has had women friends over the years but has never married. Now, turning forty-five, he has begun to ask himself whether that was a mistake. As a schoolboy he was studious but never brilliant. An only child, it was intended that he should follow in his father’s footsteps (his father, a successful lawyer, passed away when he was twelve). When the time came he dutifully ..read more

John and I met at the opening of a group show in Whitechapel. He was both an artist and a curator. He had recently been interviewed by a high-profile critic for the Financial Times and was becoming a recognised figure in the art scene. He’d been organising packed events since his first year at university, pulling together work by a number of fêted young artists in exhibitions staged in post-industrial spaces, in anti-squat buildings and shuttered, dilapidated shopping centres. I wasn’t aware of any of this at our moment of meeting, which took place in front of a portrait of John. The artist ..read more

cache 9 at sunset, the steepest steps, never thought you’d see me sweat, canter up and down the canyon, landscape of terrycloth, sky with its machine-wash fade, acid-wash shades of slate, dismount to mount again the canyon, somehow you are your own meridian, you hold the date line like a blade, your blade becomes my only banister, just like that, your state is born, no state of confusion, just like that, I’m just your state, state of play, of the union, california, too late, too early, early too so very late, claw its way into the day, selling fruit, selling futures, futures north of food and ..read more

I’ve always believed that the only constant in life is change. If we don’t embrace change, we fail to grow. Even worse, we put ourselves at risk. We lose the capacity to change when change is forced upon us. I resolved long ago I’d never again be afraid of change. And that is why I am here today. That was my opening statement. It was what I believed then and it’s what I believe now. Perhaps even more so. I sat back down in the sharing circle to the sound of clicking fingers, a sound others might call snapping. Thank you, said Hanno, our facilitator. That was so brave. Yes, said the man beside ..read more

The camera slips from place to place, fuzzy yet alert. He tells me, afterwards, that the photographs were taken over three or four days. I knew that it was days, not hours. But it could have been months. In this series of images, taken over the course of two summers in Leighton Buzzard at Camp Trans, time neither passes nor stills; it pauses just long enough for outlines and surfaces to thicken, like butter creamed with sugar. Greyscale, a thick tree forks in two. More branches sprout from the trunk, slimmer, more pliant: legs, at a jaunty angle. Shoes hummock at the base. Gigantic, entwined r ..read more

Gerald Balfour is remembered today mostly for being the brother and political confidant of Arthur Balfour, the Conservative Prime Minister and statesman who later issued the famous declaration that the British government would ‘view with favour’ the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Gerald had spent a few years in the 1870s teaching classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a few more trying to write philosophy in Florence, but in 1885 he joined the family business and entered Parliament for the Conservatives. He made little mark there until a decade later ..read more

He said to me: ‘If the sea were ink for the Words of my Lord, the sea would still run out before the Words.’1 Is it becoming of me – I who have run completely out of words – to covet the Words of my Lord?         He said to me: The serpent that bit me, its fangs alone contain my antidote, that’s why it sees me waiting at the entrance to its burrow.         He said to me: Love led me to pity my own self, to grieve it with a vertical grief. That’s what war failed to achieve, along with all my enemies.   Translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Z ..read more