Three more NYT gift articles, to use up my monthly allowance before I lose it: close readings by A. O. Scott of three poems a) Diane Seuss https://tinyurl.com/deawzhue b) Philip Larkin https://tinyurl.com/4f8zdx9c and c) Frank O’Hara https://tinyurl.com/33whwknn

Plus, a number of Granta pieces that are free till the end of the year:

1. Adrift in the South by Xiao Hai, translated by Tony Hao https://granta.com/adrift-in-the-south/

China’s manufacturing boom in the 1990s coasted on a wave of migrant workers from all corners of the country. For ‘Granta 169: China’, Xiao Hai wrote of migrating to Shenzhen at the age of fifteen and his decade spent on factory floors. The pace of the production line, the workers that compose it, the products they are assembling and Xiao Hai’s exhaustion are all rendered with transportive clarity.

2. Doing the Work by Geoff Dyer https://granta.com/doing-the-work-geoff-dyer/

In the mid-1980s a bunch of us who were living on the dole in south London got work with a market research company specializing in train travel. Half the time we were at the offices in Richmond, collating data in what was basically a very large cupboard that smelled of the fried egg sandwiches we ate for breakfast. The rest of the time was spent on trains collecting that data: conducting interviews, handing out questionnaires or using little clickers to count the numbers of passengers who got on and off at a given station. We went all over the country, travelling first class with all-station passes.

3. The others in the very readable ‘Doing the Work’ series https://granta.com/?s=doing+the+work

And now I shall be quiet till 2025!

Roy