Granta 136: Legacies of Love Essays & Memoir The White Bloc James Pogue ‘This election made clear that white people in this country have begun to vote how Southern whites always have: as a bloc.’ Essays & Memoir The Day After Trump Won Leslie Jamison ‘I feel afraid, and I do not know what to make of yesterday’s belief, which seems to belong not just to another day but to another era. I can see that belief like an object shimmering underwater, a kind of relic.’ Essays & Memoir Why We’re Post-Fact Peter Pomerantsev ‘We are living in a ‘post-fact’ or ‘post-truth’ world. Not merely a world where politicians and media lie – they have always lied – but one where they don’t care whether they tell the truth or not.’ Essays & Memoir The Decay of Politics Philip Ó Ceallaigh ‘Britain has made the control of borders and the free movement of people its central obsession, its fundamental national anxiety.’ Philip Ó Ceallaigh on Brexit. fiction Her Boy Mika Taylor ‘She is the first dolphin mother, Peter her boy genius.’ First SemesterRachel B. Glaser & John Maradik‘When she reached her hand into his underwear, again she felt the turtle.’Discoveries: The Very Ecstasy of Love Zadie on Beyoncé, Didion on diarists, Bureaucracy as Sadism, How Did They Win that prize? and more. Heavily RedactedLuiza Flynn-Goodlett‘Syllables are excised by / X-Acto, fed into a shredder / for good measure.’WendyKa Bradley‘Nathan: there’s something in the basement. In the locked rooms I was telling you about.’ Authors PodcastGranta Reads: Angela Carter’s ‘Cousins’Angela CarterPodcastGranta Reads: Carmen Maria Machado’s ‘The Husband Stitch’Carmen Maria MachadoPodcastGranta Reads: Darcey Steinke’s ‘Frankenstein’s Mother’Darcey Steinke First Sentence: A.L. KennedyA.L. Kennedy‘I have never seen anyone eat figs in the street and feel I am unsurprised.’ Five Things Right Now: Eliza RobertsonEliza Robertson‘For me, astrology’s opened this new language and field of understanding. ’ Classics How to Write about AfricaBinyavanga Wainaina‘Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.’Chickens and EggsDoris Lessing‘Twenty-one days it takes to hatch eggs, twenty-one nights, and there sits the great fierce hen who had accepted me as protector and jailer for that time.’ Time’s ArrowMartin Amis’I came rushing upward out of the blackest sleep to find myself surrounded by doctors . . . ’ Outside the WhaleSalman Rushdie‘For a man as truthful, direct, intelligent, passionate and sane as Orwell, ‘politics’ had come to represent the antithesis of his own world-view.’Frankenstein’s MotherDarcey Steinke‘If pain is what makes others real to us, there was not another human being more real to me than my mother.’ SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER Martha, MarthaZadie Smith‘From her tiny office on the third floor, Pam Roberts looked through a window and correctly identified the Martha Penk she was waiting for, a shrimpish girl pushing twenty-two, lost down there.’BeachRoberto Bolaño‘I said to myself that maybe he wasn’t about to die.’