Granta Magazine

Catastrophe Agnar Berger is speeding down the road. Yellow gloves on his hands, a glowing cigarette in his mouth. As the years go by, you get older. Your body decays, your youth departs like rats from a sinking ship. You start to notice the feeling of having a skeleton inside you. Even if you get fat, you can’t hide the fact that under your skin and that layer of fat is a cold structure made of two hundred bones. Who doesn’t remember their first encounter with a skeleton?

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It would be ungrateful to greet the seemingly new and suddenly ubiquitous if unaccustomed usage of a familiar word with resistance.

If you already have an active Granta subscription and wish to take advantage of an offer, please do let us know by emailing subs@granta.com, where our team will be more than happy to amend your subscription. Buying a gift subscription? Click here to download a free gift card to print at home. Granta publishes the best new literary writing in each quarterly issue.

My parents watch television out of tiredness, to fill the void. Sometimes separately: my mother in the morning, busying herself in the kitchen with all the breathlessness of her ninety-six kilos; my father late at night, his ankles resting on a second chair. Without shoes or socks, head thrown back and mouth half open, he wakes with a start, follows the program for ten minutes and then sinks back into an unhealthy drowsiness.

In this episode of the Granta Podcast we speak to Susie Boyt, the author of seven novels, most recently Loved and Missed, and the memoir My Judy Garland Life. We discuss Susie Boyt’s short story, ‘All Being Well’, from Granta 171: Dead Friends, and consider the function of ghosts, Henry James, and how to be mourned. Follow these links to subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Harper breezes in twenty minutes late with a shiner that takes up half her face. Even though I know better, I wince. The thing is hard to look at, the colors intense as a sunset. Harper’s desk is already set up with a sleek black laptop and the Trigonometry workbook she needs to get through by the end of the shoot, the book open on a page filled with triangles. There’s also a notebook for scratch paper and a row of new mechanical pencils neatly lined up and waiting.

The culture of hedonism and the exaltation of entertainment was at its peak a few hundred years ago, when Melaka was under the rule of Sultan Mansur Shah. The prosperity of Melaka cannot be described in words or written in ink. The Sultan’s luxurious riches exceeded those of all the European rulers at that time, when the Malay language was far more influential than English.

I’ve never worked in this flat. I’ve done the dishes – there is no dishwasher or freezer, but there is a compact fridge, which I’ve heard groaning when the night is thin and I can’t sleep and Leo sleeps – and I’ve done the washing. I’ve scrubbed down the walls of the white-tiled bathroom, which some would say looks like the lavatory of a psychiatric hospital, but I quite like it. Though work-work – I’ve never once sat down to do that here. I think a lot about my acts around the house.

Denise Rose Hansen Denise Rose Hansen is a Danish writer and editor who lives in London. The founder of Lolli Editions, she is now an editor at Penguin where she publishes the likes of Shahrnush Parsipur, Ágota Kristóf, and Anne Serre.