Declan Fry May 14, 2026 — 12:00pm I don’t want to talk to Stan Grant. I don’t think he wants to talk to me, either. His ninth book When Words Fail Us , derived from a series of 2025 lectures, lets me off the hook lightly: “I have grown bored with my language, bored with my voice, bored with my writing,” Grant reflects. “I need places where I can hold the world at bay [and] linger among those who speak more slowly, more softly.” Wondering how soft-spoken I am, I begin to imagine: Grant and I, sitting in a Taiwanese restaurant, sharing a pot of oolong. That was the plan. But Grant had to cancel; a virus affecting his inner ear was causing a sense of brain fog. Stan Grant. Chris Hopkins “It’s the most debilitating thing,” he explains. Grant tells me he underwent exercises designed “to send conflicting signals to your brain”. I wonder if his ailment speaks to his book’s sense of our contemporary world: plenty of conversation and overlapping signals but vanishingly little dialogue. “Yes!” he says, laughing.…