I had already been working for a few years before this. At thirteen, I helped my mum clean holiday cottages just outside the same harbour town. Core memories from my early working life revolve around how much food I could steal, and cleaning the holiday cottages proved particularly fruitful as the people who visited often left in a rush, leaving decadent kinds of crackers and cheese in the fridge that my mum and I would eat while we worked. The politics of food working at the fish and chip shop dominated. Also, the politics of working hours, who was on when, and where they were stationed during their shift, at least for me, as I had a consuming crush on one of the fish fryers, a man called Paul who must have been four years older than me at the time (a lifetime) but who still flirted with me safely and routinely enough for it to be contextually contained within the restaurant’s busy hierarchy. And it was busy, and I was a bad waitress. I imagine I am still a bad waitress. I am clumsy, terrible with numbers and my memory is a white board wiped clean. I cannot count the number of times I spilled whole steamy trays of freshly battered fish and chips running up and down the stairs at the restaurant, or forgot orders, or undercharged or overcharged people. This must have been one of the summer jobs I was politely let go from (like my other waitressing jobs, and the job I held tutoring English to two young girls living in Hampstead with an education so rarified they should have been teaching me). The customers were cruel, their expectations of what they would consider to be a perfect holiday were not to be ruined by a waitress’s ineptitude.

The ebb and flow of a town that accommodates a bloated number of tourists for four months of the year, only to boomerang back to desolation at the beginning of September, makes for erratic, complicated and brief personal relationships. Also, a bonding us against them mentality. We hated the tourists, but they were the reason we had jobs. They were also the reason there was work for only six months of the year. During the summer, the fish and chip shop was heaving. It held prime position, sat at the end of a car park where people would begin their short walk to the beach, so tourists ate on their way to or from the sea, starting or ending the day there. Paul was charismatic, he smelled like oil, his arms were covered in burns, he used to go out in the town and never invite me, he was often hungover and so was I, he told me I was the prettiest girl that worked there, he gave me long hugs that I interpreted as faintly sexual at the chaste-ish age of fifteen. The psychosexual dynamics that occur in a restaurant during teenage years cannot be replicated or articulated. Shit is hot, physically, psychologically, metaphorically. While I was serving customers at the till (one of the jobs I was relegated to after all else failed), Paul would touch me gently on my lower back, or pinch me to get my attention.

In a small hatch outside the restaurant there was a glass case of stacked, freshly made pavlovas. Working the pavlova stand was seen as the best job in the restaurant. Now I think back to it, it was also the greatest idea for a slightly down at heel rural chippie – a chilled mound of brilliant white pavlovas in crunchy polystyrene take-out trays. There was a woman who had been working at the restaurant for years, and with her came the unwritten knowledge that the pavlova stand, in all its comforting refrigeration away from the boil of the fish fryers, was her domain. I can’t remember her name, which was maybe Pauline, but surely the workers of this restaurant can’t all be derivatives of Paul? Nevertheless, if she was on a shift, she would be situated at the pavlova stand.

Every so often someone new would start, they would arrive early and see the pavlova stall unstaffed (un-Paulined) and think their luck was in, what a great job, to stand in the sun and hand dewy pavlovas out, start unpacking the meringue nests and whipping up the cream and cutting the strawberries in the outdoor hatch that stood comfortably in the shade and where everyone was nice to you. If Pauline caught you there, she would ask you to leave, say I’m sorry, what do you think you’re doing here? And the tacit acceptance of her attachment to the stand was the final authority, you would have to leave, unless she was not working, and then, the cream and strawberry area was for anyone. I was on the pavlova stand quite a bit, another simple job for someone who was challenged by the other tasks. Maybe once I managed to work the pavlova stand while Pauline was there, and she hovered behind me, scolding me about the way I cut the strawberries and whipped the cream. Only twice did I try frying fish, Paul at my back guiding my hands as I jostled it about in the fryer. The fat and heat were an assault, it made your hands and face hard, I remember Paul’s face being a mix of both dust and oil. I was a vegetarian at the time, and we could eat food for free at the small staffroom at the top of the restaurant, which was always boiling hot with those zooming, centre of the room flies. I would take chips with cheese and beans up for my break. For a short time, a crisp and kind Canadian woman in her twenties worked there who I remember brought her own sandwiches and ate nuts out of a tin canteen and plaited her hair and didn’t flirt with the fryers. I thought she was indescribably a world away from the fish and chip shop, and she didn’t last long. I asked her why she didn’t eat the free food, and she told me it wasn’t for her. My parents still live near the town, and I walk by it every time we visit. Once the summer is over most of the staff leave, I never saw Paul again, and they got rid of the pavlova stand.

Image © Europeana

The post Doing the Work appeared first on Granta.

Rachael Allen

My book of the year is Mark Hyatt’s So Much For life, beautifully introduced and edited by Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts, and published by Nightboat. Mark Hyatt was a Romani poet who received no formal education growing up, but who was folded into London’s queer scene in the 1960s, where he was effectively taught to read and write by lovers and friends. His story is incredible, his poetry – standing aside from his biography, but as ever and not, informed by it – is so contemporary, so hilarious, so stark, it is hard to believe he was writing in the 60s. The exclamatory and masturbatory poetics of the poem ‘Yes!’: ‘anyway the amount / of dry spunk on your belly / is unimportant / the thing is did you enjoy yourself / Yes!’, and the ambient, ludic abstractions, in syntactically perfect poems like ‘DICE’:

Here’s the to the high explosive deathbird
That troubles the vegetation on language
And separately opens the rare dysgenics
Rough like a mattock in the head!

I could quote him endlessly, and I am grateful to the editors for bringing these poems properly into print. Industrial Roots by Lisa Pike, published by Héloïse Press is an extraordinary, spikey and stylish collection of interlinked stories following working-class women and their lives in Ontario. Infused with the patterns of demotic idiom, the voices in this collection are a necessary evocation of working-class lives. The last few months I have been revisiting Najwan Darwish’s Exhausted on the Cross, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, and published by NYRB. His scant, grasping lyrical assertions, imagistic and elegiac, space-making and taking, have felt like necessary reading: ‘Night’s content with its skewed vision / day’s a blind man hurling prophecies.’

Raymond Antrobus

In a painful, transitional, challenging year for most of us, I’m grateful for how many books I’ve had to turn to: Amy Key’s Arrangements in Blue has been comforting while going through a separation, it revises the societal position of singlehood, especially for childless women and gloriously channels the atmospheric album Blue by Joni Mitchell. Shane McCrae’s Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is excellent for its slippery half-remembered lyricism, also Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon is unforgettable. Bread and Circus by Airea D. Matthews is a favourite for how it navigates class, race, parenthood, feminism, poetry / prose. John Lee Clark’s How to Communicate has become a staple collection for disability poetics, Naomi Shihab Nye’s The Tiny Journalist grounded me while making sense of the senseless killing in Gaza, as has Mosab Abu Toha’s Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear which rightfully won the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry. I can’t stop thinking about Robin Coste Lewis’s visual poetry collection To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, it’s sublime, as is Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe and Pig by Sam Sax. Nick Laird’s Up Late is his best collection to date in my opinion and Bad Diaspora Poems by Momtaza Mehri is one of the most unique and striking poetry debuts. Lastly, They Call It Love: The Politics of Emotional Life by Alva Gotby and Black on Both Sides: A Radical History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton, both intellectually nourished my thinking and language on gender.

Jeremy Atherton Lin

Curling up with Blackouts, the new novel by Justin Torres, reminded me of spending time in the company of Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia or W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. To me, these books are intensely intimate but ever-elusive, providing delectable gaps to crawl into. Blackouts is a testament to the significance of intergenerational transfer between gay men, but the connection here is coy, disorienting, fractured. I somewhat recently moved into a flat with high ceilings, and if I wasn’t previously able to quite articulate the phenomenological appeal, I’ve decided it is the capaciousness in which to contemplate a book like this – giving space to shadow and illumination, tall tales and big truths. I can’t wait to read it again.

Joanna Biggs

I read many of Willa Cather’s books this autumn while in Red Cloud, Nebraska, where Cather grew up, and my favourite was A Lost Lady, from 1923. Like Tess of the D’Urbervilles but in reverse, A Lost Lady is the story of Marian Forrester, who can’t seem to stop marrying people who benefit her materially, and loving those who are disloyal. There is a fantastic scene – reminiscent of Plath’s ‘Words Heard, By Accident, Over the Phone’ – in which Marian rings her lover on his wedding day, and a friend protects her by surreptitiously cutting the telephone wire just as her complaint turns shrill. What a friend! Marian never even knows she has been shielded, a protection in itself. A Lost Lady isn’t quite feminist, but it refuses to punish a woman for understanding she is in a marketplace, seen as a fungible asset like a packet of virgin land. To be so worldly but yet not see herself as fundamentally precious, the way her friend sees her, is Marian’s tragedy. As I stood on 612 acres of unploughed prairie in Nebraska one clear night, Marian in my blood and on my mind, I did not mistake even a stalk of red grass for a commodity.

Zoe Dubno

The most important novel I read this year was The Golden Notebook, which feels apt for right now because it presents the struggle of a politically-minded person who also lives a full and rounded life. Lessing shows the reader Anna’s thoughts and feelings about the Communist Party, but also love and motherhood and cooking and clothes. Vigdis Hjorth’s Long Live the Post Horn! also does this, while asking ‘what if contemporary literature’s sad girl heroines joined a political movement instead of taking a long nap?’ The other big reading strain for me was ‘American girl in Europe books’ like Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado and The Old Man And Me. Also, Daisy Miller. I hate nothing more than Americans being so ‘I’m an expat’ as a personality, but it’s interesting the way Americanness is interpreted in Europe and vice-versa. There’s something about the plucky American ingenue skating through wicked European self-regard that is delicious, especially when it’s like . . . sweetheart you think I’m an innocent? I’m from the most corrupt place on earth. Also, I love books about chicas getting up to a little trouble away from home, which is why I loved The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun. Julie Hecht’s Do the Windows Open? is a book of stories I read every year because they are the funniest and best stories ever written. I feel like she gets pigeonholed as a comic writer but her stories are also full of emotion and have a style completely their own. I heard a rumour that she has a new book of stories coming out which would make me the happiest girl in the world.

Diana Evans

This year I’ve been reading a mixture of nonfiction, novels and poetry and one of the standouts has been Stephen Buoro’s debut novel The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa. Written in the voice of a Nigerian teenager, Andrew Aziza, it follows him and his neighbourhood ‘droogs’ in their daily experiences and dangerous ruminations through white-centric aestheticism and religious turbulence. It caught me with its very funny yet tragic espousal of American and British slang, employed by Andy in a kind of deep-laid self-negation, and its characters who glitter off the page fully formed and irresistible. I’m always hoping, when reading fiction, for something audacious and formally interesting and this novel was a refreshing example of that. Currently I’m reading British writer Aniefiok Ekpoudom’s forthcoming nonfiction debut Where We Come From: Rap, Home & Hope in Modern Britain, which is a (long overdue) social history of UK rap and grime. It’s both moving and invigorating to read about Black-British music with such a thorough depth of research, literary elegance and a palpable love for the art, and Ekpoudom importantly highlights the power of black musical culture as a force for upliftment that is in constant battle with the heavy hand of the state. My poetry highlight for the year was Anthony Joseph’s beautiful Sonnets for Albert; I especially loved the penultimate poem ‘The Work of Generations’ and the general evoking throughout the collection of familial and earthly shifts.

Lillian Fishman

I was surprised this year when I happened upon a copy of Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey, which is remarkable not only for its psychological subtlety but also its political relevance. Set in the 1930s, it’s a portrait of the tensions among idealistic and intellectual leftists that feels extraordinarily familiar. Sándor Márai’s Embers couldn’t be more different – simultaneously austere and lavish, a story about inherited traditions, entwined destinies, and revenge – though both are complex studies of the perils of adult friendship. But my most constant reading companion this year has been Janet Malcolm, especially in The Purloined Clinic, The Silent Woman, and In the Freud Archives. A friend of mine shudders with theatrical fear every time Malcolm’s name is mentioned, so lethal and uncompromising is the hungry animal of Malcolm’s attention. ‘Would you open the door if Malcolm had come knocking?’ we sometimes ask each other, with wide eyes. I feel warm gratitude toward everyone who did open their door to her, whether from bravery or ignorance. These are books that challenge fiction writers to bring to their invented stories half the level of craft and insight that Malcolm imposes on the unruly lives of her subjects.

Camilla Grudova

This has been a year for me of rediscovering lost wonderful books, both released and still out of print. Elspeth Barker’s essays, Notes from the Henhouse, Dinah Brooke’s stunningly grotesque Lord Jim at Home, Great Granny Webster, The Fate of Mary Rose and Good Night Sweet Ladies by Caroline Blackwood (Great Granny Webster is the only one still in print, by NYRB), Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary, No Love Lost a collection of stories and novellas by Rachel Ingalls. After some discombobulating personal experiences and betrayals, Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living, Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion and Carmela Ciuraru’s Lives of the Wives told me to carry on writing when I felt I shouldn’t, while Alice Slater’s Death of a Bookseller provided delicious escape. Jen Calleja’s Vehicle renewed my sense of what literature can do, as did How High? That High by Diane Williams.

Will Harris

Early in the year, I read an essay on the ‘paraliterary’ in Samuel R. Delany’s Shorter Views which put me on to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and since then, I keep noticing the gutter between every seemingly slick scene transition. These are some recent books I’ve been reading: Edward Said’s Out of Place, Yara Hawari’s The Stone House, Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, the poems of Najwan Darwish.

Sheila Heti

Whatever happened before the summer has been forgotten, so this is a fall list. Normally I don’t teach, but I had an opportunity to lead a class called ‘The Creative Moment’ at the University of Western Ontario this year. ‘The Creative Moment’ can mean anything, so I thought I’d use it as an opportunity to re-read some of my favourite books. First, we covered Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, an amazing document by Samuel R. Delany about the disappearance of the gay porn theatres in Times Square in the mid-nineties, and the intimate, rich, unique culture that vanished with it. Then we read one my favourite novels, The Wall, written by Marlen Haushofer which is as great as any beloved classic, and should be considered one. We read Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time, and talked about capitalism, Stalinism, the richness of the interview format, where soul comes from, how it’s lost. Next week we’re reading Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise, which is about the appearance of the department store in Paris, and what it did to local commerce and the size of the human being relative to the size of what can be consumed, a story that continues to be told with all this online shopping. We also read The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon and thought about how the human creature does not change, and about the list as a form of literature, and how interesting and revealing the minutiae of a life can be. I’m in the middle of Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner, about the history of the CIA – it’s research for an article. And this summer and fall I enjoyed some wonderful books by friends: Family Life by Akhil Sharma, The Marriage Question by Clare Carlisle, The Blue Book by Amitava Kumar and Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, plus manuscripts-in-progress by other friends (Sean Thor Conroe, Sarah Manguso, Michael LaPointe, Miranda July, Tamara Shopsin). I’ve been obsessed by the techniques and innovations of the mid-century psychologist Carl Rogers and am reading his books and listening to his Client Centred Therapy on audiobook. Because of my commute to the university, I’m also enjoying, on audiobook, Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken and, for the second time, Laverne Cox’s wonderfully vivid narration of Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. I am sick of podcasts, just sick of them all.

Seán Hewitt

The best book I read this year was Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe, a reissue of the 1994 novel which blends the voice of the English mystic with that of a modern man in the crucible of love. It is breathtaking. I’ve recently finished Hisham Matar’s new novel, My Friends (out in 2024) – a sweeping yet intimate look at exile and the bonds of friendship told with real humanity. In poetry, I loved Vona Groarke’s Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara, which blends archival study with the imagined life of a young Irish migrant to the USA, and I also spent a lot of time with June Jordan, in particular her Haruko/Love Poems, which was reissued early in the year. In stranger territory, Gabriel Cooney’s Death in Irish Prehistory is a brilliant, beautifully illustrated exploration of the archaeology of burial sites in Ireland, and Rebecca Perry’s short lyric essay On Trampolining was full of light, air, and floating, and took me into a world I wouldn’t ordinarily read about.

Anton Jäger

Taken as a whole, this proved a year of re-reading rather than first dates – partly for reasons of leisure, partly out of professional duty. I spent the summer with Eric Hobsbawm’s Interesting Times, a witness document of twentieth-century history that might just surpass the official achievement of Age of Extremes. The book is much more of a first-hand report, yet still has at least one multi-year research project buried in every page. To get a grip on the familiar and unfamiliar geopolitics of the 2020s I read the collected essays of Peter Gowan, particularly his A Calculus of Power. Gowan’s might just be the best textbook in international relations from a Marxist point of view. Just for the sake of hygiene I re-read Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror, after a short infatuation with Arthur Koestler and his works on ancient Judaism; perhaps even more imposing as a book in an age in which politics has returned but ideology is still conspicuously absent from our political scene. I also read Elias Canetti’s third instalment in his memoir series, Die Fackel im Ohr, which covers the Viennese interwar years with colourful luminaries by the likes of Broch, Musil and Brecht. In terms of more dangerous reading I finally found my way to Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea; a despicably apologetic text, but with occasional flashes of brilliance, particularly in his intellectual history of sea creatures as political metaphors.

Amitava Kumar

This summer I was traveling along the Ganges and I got stuck high in the Himalayan region due to a landslide. Buses, trucks, cars on the highway at a standstill for sixteen hours. On Audible, I listened to Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. It made everything I was experiencing both real and fantastically funny. A few months earlier I had cremated my father on the banks of the Ganges and this trip had been a way to return to my grief. In the time since I have been reading more about writers and the death of fathers. Martin Amis, Experience; Sharon Olds, The Father; Louise Glück, Ararat; Susan Cheever, Home Before Dark; V.S. Naipaul, Letters Between a Father and Son; Annie Ernaux, A Man’s Place. This week, however, I have been reading Tessa Hadley’s Clever Girl. The narrator has been told that her father is dead and then she finds out that he is still alive. I have reached the place in the novel where the father, unaware of his connection to our narrator, has been hired to give her a driving lesson. The reason I’m reading this novel is that Geoff Dyer said on the LRB podcast that Hadley’s novel is ‘the rosetta stone of fiction’. I saw Geoff last week in New York and he told me that he particularly remembers the first seventy or so pages that he read as if in a trance. I was on a train when I read those pages and I had the same experience.

Catherine Lacey

I must so obviously belong to the target demographic for works of fiction that feel like essays without being directly auto-fictional; such books always find me and I always enjoy them. My favourite recent entry into this category is Margarita García Robayo’s The Delivery, more specifically Megan McDowell’s translation from the Spanish of Robayo’s novel, which was published this year by the always-satisfying Charco Press. (A good way to decide which contemporary novels to read in a sea of deeply trivial garbage is to just read whatever Charco is doing. The Edinburgh-based publisher’s entire mission is to bring contemporary Latin American fiction to English-reading audiences and I’ve been obsessed with their books for many years now.) The Delivery centres on a writer in Buenos Aires who is procrastinating on a grant application and ambivalently dating some guy when a huge box is delivered to her apartment. Her estranged mother, apparently, is inside the box, an arrival that sets off a surreal and uncomfortable few weeks during which seemingly neither of the women know what’s going on and both are trying to pretend everything is normal. The prose is staccato. The scenes are rendered in pointillist detail. A sense of madness simmers just below the surface, coming close to a boil but never quite reaching it.

Momtaza Mehri

Estrangement has a colour. Dispossession has a scent. The Last Exit is a local cafe. The sea retains what is repressed. Hussein Barghouthi’s The Blue Light makes a good case for these epiphanies. I read Fady Joudah’s translation of Barghouthi’s classic in a haze, ambushed by its gentle, propulsive energy. Madness, or its looming presence, breaks open the memoir form. With these shards of light, Barghouthi casts shadows of historical and personal memory. We first meet him as a young Palestinian student in Seattle, awash with alienation, on the precipice of losing his mind. His relationship with an enigmatic Sufi helps him make sense of these stirrings, leading to philosophical and literary wanderings. Language, like exile, is a series of disfigurements. There’s something so bewitchingly honest about madness as explored by Barghouthi, an integrated state of abandon that both terrifies and fascinates him. It’s the blueness of incitement. The blue of al-ghayb (the unseen) and the sky of childhood. Barghouti is staunchly imagistic, a keeper of a vagrant inventory, one of neon street signs, gas lamps, bleached rocks, naked solitude, and contraband feeling.

Okechukwu Nzelu

In 2023, I did a lot of catching up on books published in previous years but it was worth it. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson completely blew me away. I’m particularly late to the party on this one (it was published ten years ago) but I cannot stop thinking about it. It is so rare to find a novel that speaks to both the head and the heart. Life After Life explores what would happen if its protagonist died as a baby, as a young child, as a young woman, or in later life. It is deftly experimental yet compulsively readable. Jenn Ashworth’s Notes Made While Falling is one of the best books I have ever read. The writer’s experience of various kinds of hurt and healing is cleverly woven amongst a dazzlingly broad collection of things Ashworth has read, seen and observed. The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans is a remarkable book. Its titular short story takes character development to a level rarely seen in narratives of any length, challenging our perceptions of who is good, who is bad and (crucially) how we cross over from one to the other. Another novel, Real Life by Brandon Taylor, is a deeply impressive book of interconnected narratives: he writes so convincingly about both violence and tenderness. Finally, Andrew McMillan’s Pity, forthcoming in 2024, is that most envious of books: an excellent novel by an excellent poet.

Oluwaseun Olayiwola

The then-Twittersphere only marginally prepared me for the powerhouse that is Christina Sharpe and her 2023 genre-defying book Ordinary Notes. It’s winter now but I remember reading Ordinary Notes in high summer. It has productively haunted me since. Sharpe combines autobiography, memoir, photography, literary and cultural criticism in this deftly moving exploration of personal and collective grief, and joy. One wants to do to Ordinary Notes what Sharpe has done to her copy of Toni Morrison’s Beloved: destroy it with notes, markings, sticky tabs, re-readings, coffee spills, etc . . . This is essential reading. Visionary is not a word that should be used lightly, though it is the only word that comes to mind since I first read Ben Lerner’s The Lights. It’s not a thin collection, it’s more like an ocean, or what I imagine the spectacular energy from a quasar would feel like, wild and pure. I let Lerner’s loquaciousness wash over me, multiple times, and each time I feel enriched. To me, its great achievement is the depiction to the artist who struggles, loses and re-finds faith in his craft. 2023 has been my hunt for great sentences. I have Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence to thank for this (to which Dillon’s own and the ones he cites satisfy the hunt). Or perhaps anything written by Zadie Smith (interviews as well!!). Early this year, I happened upon The Journal: 1837–1861 by Henry David Thoreau: ‘For our aspirations there is no expression as yet, but if we obey steadily, by another year we shall have learned the language of last year’s aspirations.’ My aspirations for the end of this year and beginning of next is to get even more lost inside Thoreau’s swirly, evocative sentences that somehow always seem perfectly wrought.

Derek Owusu

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes is still with me months later. I often visualise the book’s final images and try to piece together the enigmatic shards of the story, always failing but enjoying the effort. Another book I still think about, and apply to my life, is Ultra-Processed People by Dr Chris van Tulleken. It’s no exaggeration to say it’s a book that can potentially change your life for the better, detailing the science and dangers of ultra-processed foods and highlighting the shady corporations that put profit before public health. Finally, finding myself in a mid-year reading slump, I also revisited a few old favourites to rekindle my enthusiasm for reading: A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (surprising how underrated his novels are), Cain by José Saramago, In the Ditch by Buchi Emecheta, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger, which I’m now certain contains some of the best set pieces I’ve ever read.

Ben Pester

No preamble from me. First up is Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan. I treated this slim book almost like a holy text at the time I was reading it. During the long commutes and weird detours, this story about a woman who loved horses was all I cared about outside of my immediate family. Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague by Christopher Neve is technically non-fiction, but it’s also a work of astonishing imagination and joy. Each submersion into the final days’ work of great artists is itself a submersion into Neve’s own constant struggle to be there, to see it happen. I loved Amy Key’s Arrangements in Blue, both for the quality of the writing and for some complicated reasons I keep failing to express properly. It confronts, and triumphs against, an atmospheric kind of fear I’ve lived with since I was a child, of being alone; of not quite being enough. Of course, it’s not actually about me, but is a profoundly uplifting and personal book. I felt grateful to the author every time I picked it up. Joshua Jones’s story collection Local Fires too had a hold over me that is rooted in memory, with its vignettes of small-town life, damp at the edges with lager, stupidity and all-consuming romance. I’ve been kept company while writing by the pure quality of Brother Poem by Will Harris, Brutes by Dizz Tate, August Blue by Deborah Levy, Eastmouth and Other Stories by Alison Moore, and everything I can find by M. John Harrison.

Leo Robson

I spent a revitalising summer with the work of two extraordinary novelist-critics, Milan Kundera and Adam Mars-Jones, who, though very different – see Mars-Jones’s takedown of Immortality – nonetheless started out with a book of loosely linked L-laden stories (Laughable Loves, Lantern Lecture), collaborated with Edmund White (he was translator in one case, co-author in the other), and specialise in a sort of cerebral comedy that tackles themes of desire and social mores against a frequently repressive backdrop. The return to Kundera was prompted by his death aged 94 following a long illness, the return to Mars-Jones by the happier occasion of his triumphant new novel Caret, the third in an ongoing series. In my own reading life, they have a strong association with Faber paperbacks purchased during late adolescence – Amazon tells me I bought their first novels in the space of a fortnight – and then greedily consumed, and with a store of insight into the craft and history of the novel on which I constantly draw.

Alison Rumfitt

My favourite new book published this year is likely one you’ll see on many other lists – Penance by Eliza Clark is simply as excellent as they say. Outside of that, though, I’ve been rather bad at reading books published this year. I’ve started listening to the audiobook of Julia Fox’s Down the Drain but podcast episodes I need to listen to keep coming out and eating up my precious listening time. There are many other new books that I know I’ll like but which I haven’t gotten round to; most of the other books I’ve read have been older. Thomas Ligotti’s Teatro Grottesco, for example, has been very useful to me in terms of learning how shorter fiction functions. It’s also wonderful nightmare fuel. Along similar lines I recommend one of the few new books I did read, Michael Wehunt’s The Inconsolables, a collection of short horror stories of similar gravity. Returning to older books though, I’ve continually gotten a lot from Kōbō Abe this year, in particular The Ark Sakura and Secret Rendezvous.

Stephanie Sy-Quia

This year, I returned to Hisham Matar’s staggeringly beautiful A Month in Siena, a slim volume documenting the aftermath of writing his memoir The Return. It’s a book about art and love and the beauty of civil society, and it made me weep once again. I read Amy Bloom’s In Love, a memoir about seeking (and obtaining) assisted suicide for her husband after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, in one sitting, practically through the night. Alison MacLeod’s Tenderness is a doorstopper (not usually my type), but a deeply moving, and sprawling, narrative of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’s inception and later obscenity trial. Anahid Nersessian’s Keats’s Odes was a shot in the arm: sexy, pulsing, rangy academic writing at its best. I read Oscar Moore’s PWA: Looking AIDS in the Face, the memoir compiled from the Guardian column of the same name which ran from 1994 to 1996, when Moore succumbed to the disease. The writing is witty, gorgeous, operatic, and reads like the rage-fuelled poems of Wilfred Owen. Finally, Octavia Bright’s This Ragged Grace was a wonderful piece of intertwined life writing combining sobriety and care and has given me an aphorism for the ages: ‘one of the most complex dynamics in a family is navigating everyone’s right to denial’.

Dizz Tate

I loved Cousins by Aurora Venturini (translated by Kit Maude). It felt so singular in its vision; ruthlessly ambitious, honest and piercingly unsentimental about language, class, art, people. I also read Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney for the first time over the summer; it felt so brilliantly current to have been published forty years ago. I felt like it was asking a lot of the same questions that a young person would be asking now, about economics, the point-of-it-all, the tribulations of love – all while being incredibly funny and forgiving. I also reread Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook; startling, spare, with a last line that made me feel like I’d dropped off the edge of the book into a whole new world. I’m very excited to read The Illiterate next (translated by Nina Bogin) which was republished in May.

Ralf Webb

Reading John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row was a wonderful experience, something like Under Milk Wood, but set in Monterey, California. The style and sensibility are completely unlike the spare prose and harsh realism of his big novels. Cannery Row is instead – in Steinbeck’s words – a tone, a quality of light, a poem, a dream. Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove was my summer read, a 950-page epic western about men who never stopped being boys; men with impoverished emotional lives, who can neither forget nor face up to the past, and who express themselves through conquest, violence and suicidal frontierism. So: cowboys and cattle, mostly. But McMurtry’s ability to conjure an atmosphere of searingly beautiful nostalgia makes you feel sort of drunk while reading it (good drunk, not bad drunk). I also read Lauren Aimee Curtis’ Strangers at the Port, a mesmeric and lyrical novel about a fictive island and its inhabitants, which eschews narrative convention in favour of something more elusive, fractured, and choral. The novel gestures to themes of imperialism and ecosystem collapse; masculinity and maternity; incarceration, ostracisation and superstition. Ultimately, though, it’s difficult to categorise, which is another way of saying it is truly original. Anything else? Momtaza Mehri’s Bad Diaspora Poems: a generous debut collection of poetry by a visionary artist and inspiring thinker.

Eley Williams

A lot of my year seemed given over to different types of uncertainty – moving between houses, falling behind with jobs, negotiating new sorts of wobbly imbalances with a toddler and newborn – and I was particularly grateful for all the books that offered exuberance or inventiveness on their pages, with characters or depictions written with swagger, intensity or delight. Reading the McNally Edition’s reprint of A Green Equinox by Elizabeth Mavor was a sprawling pleasure (come for the oddly troubled surface of a reclaimed gravel-pit, stay for the tragicomedy of intergenerational queer desire), while Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché’s co-authored ‘techno-noir’ Prophet gave just the right mix of edge-of-your-seat action and chewy ethical dilemmas: a blast. Both M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here and Thunderstone by Nancy Campbell were stand-out playful reframings of the memoir form for me, while the intimacies and intimations of My Child, the Algorithm by poet Hannah Silva staged an enlivening, provocative encounter between notions of parenthood and storytelling, via AI and glitching. Difficult to categorise in terms of form, Tomoé Hill’s narrator in Songs for Olympia laces theory, art history and erotic vexation together in the best of ways, and I found it made for a great pairing with Isabella Streffen’s pursuit-portrayal of myth and myth-making in Fabulae: How it Begins. Getting me out of the house, I also really enjoyed Richard Smyth’s The Jay, The Beech and the Limpetshell: Finding Wild Things With My Kids which managed to be both funny, urgent, authoritative and tender: I know I will return to it often.

Missouri Williams

I’ve been letting friends direct my reading this year with great results. Particular favourites have been Marie Redonnet’s Hotel Splendid, which is about a woman trying to keep her family hotel from rotting into the surrounding swamp, and Nathalie Sarraute’s The Golden Fruits, which was about the extreme pretentiousness of literary criticism. Both books seemed to be about spectacular failures, or at least I thought so, and I enjoyed witnessing that. I also read Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse after having been told that I’d like it for years. I did. And then I read René Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, mostly for its title, which it absolutely lived up to. It left me thinking a lot about scapegoats, good ones and bad ones, and why we need them. Lastly, this was the year I decided to read more in Czech, and I’m glad I decided to because I discovered some amazing things. Veronika Korjagina’s wildly inventive Nepřišel čas (The Time Hasn’t Come) made a huge impression on me, as did Marek Torčík’s new novel Rozložíš paměť (Memory Burn), which only just came out this year, and is really beautiful, calm, and thoughtful. I hope they get translated someday.

Image © Specious Reasons

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It soon became clear that the submitted works separated into genres, or, more loosely, trends: the historical novels, most notably The Parisian by Isabella Hammad and The New Life by Tom Crewe; speculative fiction (Sophie Mackintosh, Julia Armfield, Sarvat Hasin, Missouri Williams and Alison Rumfitt); and, perhaps most distinctly, a number of autobiographical novels about gang culture, all written in the vernacular. Graeme Armstrong (The Young Team), Gabriel Krauze (Who They Was) and Moses McKenzie (An Olive Grove in Ends) all made the shortlist, as did the works of Guy Gunaratne (In Our Mad and Furious City and Mister, Mister), which are more explicitly concerned with the theatre of global violence drawn onto a particular London stage (a council estate, a bus). The former three are novels of masculinity and honour, where violence (beyond its role in the commerce of drugs and robbery) is a force simultaneously tainting and purifying. The characters – mostly boys and young men – seem to be always in motion, moving through decaying environments, inventing codes and gestures, buying, selling, planning, talking. Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts has some affinity with these worlds, with its protagonist’s voice of dirty disaffection and thinly veiled disdain, but her alienation is symbolic, static, singular to the point of loneliness. Camilla Grudova’s writing, too, deadpan, experimental, at times scatological, evokes some of the same atmosphere, as does Lauren Aimee Curtis’s faintly distorted women (nuns) in the short novel Dolores, which creates a similar juxtaposition (and interrogation) of the sullied and the pure.

It is a platitude to say that every list reflects the taste of the jurors, but this panel represented a wider range of taste than I had expected – our ideas of, and feel for, literary merit diverged quite radically. I hope the final list might be more interesting for it, containing, as it does, a wide range of voices, but still, the dividing line between the writers who made the final list and those who didn’t has never felt quite so permeable. I never have much faith in lists in any case, and I think we should acknowledge that a different panel might easily have chosen a different group of novelists. Apart from the shortlisted authors mentioned above, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Claire Powell, Naoise Dolan or Kirsty Logan might have been chosen for their works of deceptive simplicity and narrative verve; Daisy Johnson, Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, Lauren John Joseph or Shola von Reinhold for their innovation and exuberance; A.K. Blakemore, Fiona Mozley, Barney Norris, James Cahill, Samuel Fisher or James Clarke for their serious and polished writing; and Vanessa Onwuemezi, Dizz Tate, Omar Robert Hamilton or Daisy Lafarge for their originality. These writers could all have been on the list, and of course there are others, too.

The judges read, and thought about language, intention, originality, characters, structure, plot and complexity. In our meetings, Rachel Cusk talked about writers’ ability (or failure) to control and transcend their own material as an important criterion for inclusion on the list. We discussed authenticity of voice, particularly in relation to the works written in the vernacular. We were interested in experimental writing, but we also felt it was important to include authors who did not necessarily play with language, but whose craft and imagination made them outstanding storytellers. Tash Aw questioned how far we should privilege a text’s internal sense or logic in our choices, and Brian Dillon noted the slightly caressing, watery feel of many of the novels on the shortlist, and the hard singularity of others. Helen Oyeyemi (the judge among us perhaps most committed to fiction testing the boundaries of convention) was also interested in whether the writer succeeded in evoking curiosity in the reader – were we compelled to know what happens next?

What does the list tell us about the next generation or the state of the nation? I am hesitant to speculate, particularly since we changed the eligibility criteria for admission, dropping the requirement of a British passport in favour of those who live here and think of this country as home. Five authors on the list, including Eleanor Catton, were born abroad, and Sara Baume was born in Britain but lives in Ireland. But some common themes still emerge – these writers are millennials, the 9/11 generation. Most of them are too young to have experienced much of the brief period of hope following the end of the Cold War. They grew up affected by harsh threats and counterthreats – terror and the war on terror, the financial crash of 2008 followed by austerity and economic polarisation, radical moments followed by disillusion. There are dystopian themes in the novels we considered but affection for the local is here, too, most notably in the short stories of Thomas Morris (We Don’t Know What We’re Doing) and Saba Sams (Send Nudes). We noted the struggle to make meaning of hard lives (Yara Rodrigues Fowler and Natasha Brown) and the various attempts to understand the conditions of displacement or (more generally) alienation (Olivia Sudjic, Lauren Aimee Curtis, Jennifer Atkins, Anna Metcalfe). We were all excited by the more experimental texts trying to understand and explore the limits of what language and writing can do (Eley Williams, Derek Owusu, Sara Baume, Graeme Armstrong, Sarah Bernstein). Some of the writers on the list defy categorisation – Eleanor Catton’s work is conceptual and imaginative, yet pacy and well plotted, mixing the historical with the contemporary, and the genres broadly termed ‘literary’ and ‘thriller’. Finally, K Patrick’s short novel Mrs S was a revelation. Like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (a hybrid memoir essay on queer identity), it simply and tenderly returns to the question of love: what it is, and what it feels like.

To the judges: thank you. I am grateful for your company, your commitment, your diligence and your insight. To the publishers and agents who engaged with this process, thank you. To all the Granta editors – Luke Neima, Rachael Allen, Josie Mitchell, Eleanor Chandler, Lucy Diver and Brodie Crellin – who took on the extra burden of reading and logistics. Chairing those editorial meetings has been a privilege and a pleasure. Most of all, thank you to all the writers, whether they were on the final list or not. Writing is a mysterious thing: marks on the page evoking images in the minds of others, but it has given me and many others the backbone of our lives, our work, our culture and our own imaginary homelands.

Artwork © Donal Sturt

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Rachael Allen: Could you tell us about the race that’s documented in the photos? How does it work? How do people take part?

Duane Hall: I guess, for the relay races, I don’t know how it started. I’ve never got to the bottom of that, I’ve never really done the research. But, first of all, it’s a lot of intense training. You’ve got to choose the right horse. You’ve got to get to know the horse. Train him, pretty much raise him up. And then extensive hours to get to know the horse, get a feel for the horse. As well as your teammates. They’ve got to be a big part of it. They’ve got to be there throughout the whole training from start to finish.

And when they get to the races, there’s a sense of adrenaline, a kind of animosity, if you will, and a lot of anxious feelings. You can really feel the horses, when you’re around them, you can feel their spirit coming to life. They know what they’re trained to do, what they’re supposed to do. So they’re on high alert.

When the race starts, you get tunnel vision. You don’t see a lot of stuff. You don’t feel a lot of emotions. You just concentrate on what your job is during the race. When the race starts, it’s like all bets are off. You don’t got no more brothers except for your teammates, because they’re the ones who are helping you throughout the race. It seems, in those short minutes it takes to run the relay race, it’s every man for himself, and every horse for themselves.

The jockey himself, he has the biggest job. The jockey and the catcher. The jockey has to stay mounted. And the catcher has to make sure the horse doesn’t run him over or get away. A loose horse on a track means disqualification. So, if your catcher doesn’t catch the horse, or your outholder doesn’t keep a hold of the horse, and they get loose, then it’s automatic disqualification.

Allen: So you have to have a lot of control over something that might not want to be controlled.

Hall: No, you have no control. If the horse is going to make up his mind to take off down the track with you dragging then you’re either going to let go or you’re going to hang on. The horse, just like a human, they have a mind of their own, they have their own emotions, their own thoughts. And if they decide this is what they’re going to do, then all we can do is hang on and pray for the best.

Allen: Do you own the horses? Who owns the horses?

Hall: I don’t, I don’t own any horses. I was fortunate enough to get on a team. One of my good friends, who had been involved in races for some years, one day said, ‘Hey, we need a teammate.’ And I said, ‘Okay, I don’t know what I’m doing but I’ve watched enough, I think I can figure it out.’ And so we went on, and it was quite the experience. I just fell in love with it. And actually, a couple of times, I didn’t tell no one where I was going. I just packed my bags and headed off to a race, and my family was calling and asking when I was coming for dinner and I said, ‘Well, I’m about six hours away so I won’t be home for a few days, I’m running these horses.’ It’s a lot of fun.

Allen: Is it dangerous?

Hall: It can be. I don’t know anybody who’s been severely hurt, knock on wood. They get run over, they get hit by a horse. But not severely hurt, where they can’t walk or talk, or even die. I have really great brothers who have won the championship several times. It’s amazing to watch them run, they’re really good. I like to be behind the scenes when they’re doing their stuff, so I can watch and learn, and kind of mimic what they do when I get to be a part of it. So it’s all learning, all the time.

Josie Mitchell: What makes a good team?

Hall: A good team? You’ve got to get a good rider, someone who practices a lot, who grew up around horses. And then you’ve got to have someone who’s got enough bravery or willpower to stand in front of a running horse and grab it while it’s running, and stop it. That’s another big part. Also a holder who can keep the next horse calm and ready to run the next lap. The outholder is already tired from a lap, and is catching his breath, and doesn’t usually try any funny business.

But also you’ve got to have the right horses, horses that are willing to participate, learn as they’re training, run and do their best. Horses are athletes also. They pack the rider. They have to listen to the holder, catcher, you know. It’s a big, big picture of what comes down to what you see on the racetrack. It’s so many hours of training horses, of practicing, it’s like a never-ending cycle, where you have to be a part of your horses’ lives as much as they are a part of yours, year-round. I’ve seen some of my friends drive two hours just to practice for an hour, so it’s dedication, lots and lots of dedication. That’s what makes a good team.

Allen: Do you work with the same horse? Do you race the same horse you work with?

Hall: No, there’s three different horses in a relay race, typically. There’s a horse race in Emerald Downs that consists of four horses because that’s a bigger track. So they divided that up, four horses per race. You start out with your veteran horse. Your veteran horse will, in a way, teach the younger horses, like older brothers teach younger brothers, or dads teach sons, or uncles teach nephews, or cousins teach cousins. It’s the same aspect as a human training for a sport. With the horses, they train the same way as a human does. I think, I’m pretty sure, the younger horses watch the older horses and pretty soon they calm down. They get with the program, but it’s just lots and lots of practice and training.

Allen: What does it feel like when you’re in a race?

Hall: It’s definitely an adrenaline rush. From the time you start wrapping your horse’s legs, when you start getting prepped and ready to go out on track, you’re calm, you’re taking care of business behind the scenes, getting the horses prepped, getting the teammates ready, or the teammates getting you ready, however it works out. But once you go from the stables, or where your horses are tied up, and start walking out to the track, you get all these thoughts, all these emotions; you get flooded with adrenaline, you’re thinking what’s the best that could happen, what’s going to happen? Your mind has all these questions. But as soon as you hit that track, it’s 100 percent business and adrenaline. It’s really intense. You can feel your veins on fire from your blood flowing just so fast.

I haven’t done drugs, per se. But I drink alcohol quite a bit. The adrenaline rush that you get from the race is like no other high, I believe. I don’t know about harder drugs, but once you hit that adrenaline high, I don’t think there’s anything that can match that. And it seems like it’s a rush the whole entire time. And when you leave the track your hands are shaking and you’re fidgety, and you’re just – whoa, you know.

I never got to experience a whole lot of it. But I grew up around it, watching. But when I did get the chance to try it, I grabbed it and ran with it. I just figured life’s too short to miss out on certain things. And watching my brothers grow up doing it, it just made me want to try it more and more. So I actually had to take time off work a few times to just go do it. Just take off.

Nobody really taught me. I just watched and learned, from being around it. I talked to a lot of my friends who did it for a long time, and asked them what it was like. And, they have teammates, they’ve had them since they were teenagers, or younger, some of them. So they grew up together doing this, and for somebody to step in and take somebody else’s place was a rare opportunity. So then I got the chance with Katherine Menthorne’s team Umatilla, down in Pendleton, Oregon, which is where Fergus first became a part of the scene.

She’d asked me a year before, or one of her jockeys who’s from my hometown said, ‘Well, I need a hand, can you help?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll give it a shot.’ And ever since then, every chance I get, I’m jumping on a team. It’s a lot of fun, a lot of joking when the teams are walking out. If you do something wrong, the other team, or your own teammates, will correct you, they’ll tell you, ‘Hey man.’ When you mess up, they’re your big brother, even though they’re younger than you. Some of them are younger than me, but they’ve been doing it for so much longer than me, they know the ropes so they correct me. It’s amazing how close everyone is, until it’s time to race.

!-!-!-!

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Allen: Did Fergus race, when he was there?

Hall: No, I don’t think that he got the chance. But I think that he was more into his photographs over anything. And that was his biggest concern – getting a good picture.

 

Allen: What was it like having him there?

Hall: It was interesting when he first got there. At first, it was kind of like we were babysitters. Katherine brought this 21-year-old young man and handed him to myself and the jockey of the team at that time and said, ‘Protect him, take care of him, don’t let anything happen to him.’ And we were party animals back then, like superbad. And I told Fergus, ‘Well, if you like to drink and run around, let’s go.’ And he survived the first night, so I figured, well, this is going to be a long weekend.

And he was respectful enough that he wouldn’t take a picture without asking. And that’s what really gained my trust, and other people’s trust around him. Because, at first we were like – wait, we’re here in Pendleton, Oregon, racing horses at a big Pendleton roundup, partying and running around and whatever. So at first we thought, if he takes the wrong picture, we’re going to get in trouble. If he takes the right photo, we’re going to get a pat on the back. And he explained a lot to us about what his intentions were so we decided, ‘Yeah, go ahead, take as many as you want.’

He was going to stay in Pendleton. But the weekend after the Pendleton roundup, we had our horse races up here at the county fair. And so, myself and Louis Zacherle invited him up, and he stayed the rest of his three-month visa and in that three months, between Louis and me, we brought him out on the mountains and all over to the sites of our reservation. And he just fell in love. He couldn’t get enough of it.

I was really surprised the following spring, when he emailed me and asked if he could come over and stay for a spell. So he came over, and I came and picked him up from the bus stop, and he came and stayed at our house. We went out in the woods and I introduced him to everybody I knew. And with that group of people, he found his own little clique who he got to know well enough that he could go to stay at their houses for a time, and take pictures and run around with them, and see other sites that I might not have shown him. And he has a family here, who, when they see him, they open their door and welcome him with open arms. It’s pretty amazing to have a guy from anywhere else be that close with everybody around here.

 

Allen: Is he planning to come back over?

Hall: He wants to. But with Covid and stuff, that’s the big issue. I think he’s trying to save money for whatever he needs. But I’ve told him that if he ever wants to come back, whenever he can, my door’s always open and if he wants to come bad enough, and Covid doesn’t prevent that, I told him I’d buy him an airplane ticket. I love the guy. Every time he comes my kids go, ‘Oh I remember you, I know who you are.’ They just start crawling all over him, it’s amazing.

And I am trying to plan a trip over there. When Covid’s done, I would love to go over and meet you two, as well as Fergus’s family, and his girlfriend, in person. So they can get to meet one of the guys behind the scenes. I think that would be really awesome.

I like traveling. I’ve worked all over the United States, and I’ve got to see a lot of beautiful places, and a lot of really rundown sad places, different reservations, and when I saw those places, I’d look at my home and think, I live in paradise compared to some of the places I’ve seen.

 

Allen: What’s your work? What’s allowed you to see that?

Hall: Construction. I chase the dollar. Recently, since Irene has been born, I stay home. If I can’t find a job here then I make it by. I work on rigs, I do projects here and there, to help us get by.

 

Mitchell: Fergus gives this impression of a place that’s really special. What do you think makes the Colville Reservation so extraordinary?

Hall: I don’t think a reservation is any more special than any other part of the country. It’s just what we make of it, because it’s all that we have left of the continent. I’m not trying to be woohoo wahwah, but our cultural tradition is embedded in us for eternity, and we take that with every generation, and every generation passes it down. Like with our hunting and our fishing. Our land, we try to take care of it in a different way. In a spiritual way that we’ve been taught from our elders. Passed down.

And I think what makes it so important is we’re supposed to be a sovereign reservation, a sovereign people, so we make our own laws and our own rules, and we abide by them outside of the state. But also, I think a lot of people envy us because we get to hunt seven months out of the year, we get to fish all year long, and the non-tribal members around here, they only got a total of twenty days to hunt, so that’s what makes everybody think that a reservation is so extraordinary. So when you see relay teams thriving, it’s a wonderful sight, and amazing to be able to participate.

 

Mitchell: When did you first see the photographs? You were there when they were taken. What was it like to look at the photographs afterwards, and see yourself, and see the things you know so well being represented by this outsider?

Hall: When I see the photographs Fergus took, I feel honored and proud that I got to be a part of that. I got to get him to the destination, and I feel like a picture, a photograph, is a moment in time that might otherwise be overlooked. If someone hadn’t captured that moment, you’d never be there again. You can go to the same place, but it won’t have the same meaning as the first or the second time. Each time you go somewhere, it has a different meaning, or a different emotion, because it’s a different time. And obviously, in time, everyone’s life changes, one way or another. But I think with Fergus’s photos, I think that it’s intriguing to see the different angles and the excitement of him getting out that camera to take any picture at any random place. Everyone says that a picture’s worth a thousand words, but you’ve got to choose the correct words to match the picture.

It’s been an amazing experience. The last time that Fergus and I talked, he talked about how much he’s matured in the past five years, coming here, taking the photographs, staying with families. And I think that’s the same with me. This guy came in, and not only do I have to worry about my family, but this guy from overseas, I’ve got to make sure he’s sent home safe and in one piece.

 

All images © Fergus Thomas

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]]> https://granta.com/maureen-n-mclane-conversation/ Tue, 17 Jan 2017 10:47:59 +0000 https://granta.com/?p=50145 Granta’s poetry editor Rachael Allen talks to Maureen N. McLane about ecology, lyric authority, and balancing poetry with criticism.

The post Maureen N. McLane in Conversation appeared first on Granta.

]]> Maureen N. McLane is the author of five poetry collections and of My Poets, a hybrid work of memoir and criticism. Her new book, Some Say, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in July 2017. McLane talked to our poetry editor, Rachael Allen, about ecology, lyric authority, and balancing poetry with criticism.

 

 

Rachael Allen:

The poems in your previous book worked from/under the guise of a character, ‘Mz N’. A number of poems in your new collection Some Say, to me, stem from experimentations with speaking from an ‘I’: there is no Mz N here. The book seems to experiment with the concept of what it means to say – the endless possibilities of speaking, what a reader might miss, what they might overhear, what is misheard, what it means to communicate in general. I think of W.S. Graham’s poem ‘Implements in their Places’, that seems to speak to a more complicated idea of hearing and speaking than just of speech and return:

Do not think you have to say
Anything back. But you do
Say something back which I
Hear by the way I speak to you.

With the book as a whole being called Some Say, and with those colloquial and tricksy titles such as ‘As I was saying, the sun’, I feel there is an effort to destabilize both the poems authority and the position from which you are speaking in the poems. The reader is made to ask, what might have been spoken before this poem? Who am I reading here, and what did I miss? To me, there’s a manner in this book of two-stepping, or play, as with the character of Mz N. Was an exploration in speech/lyric authority important to you here?

 

Maureen N. McLane:

Oh that Graham poem is so wonderful, and it was brought home to me in a new way in Denise Riley’s Say Something Back – which I encountered after I finished Some Say. Yes, for sure – the question of speech, address, responsiveness, whatever lyric enunciation might be, these all were humming in my ears in recent years, alongside the more character-driven, narrative-ish work propelling my book, Mz N: the serial. I envisioned them as companions, complements, and had a fantasy they might be simultaneously published. They certainly emerged simultaneously. The question of authority, I guess, arises for me more as a mode of responsiveness – a number of poems begin, as you say, ‘in medias res’, conjuring prior exchanges or possible horizons of thought and address. I don’t actually think this destabilizes a poem’s authority – I think it suspends it, decenters it from a declamatory position, puts the speaker in a condition of responding even in moments when it seems a poem asseverates. There are so many models of lyric – Allen Grossman and Susan Stewart beautifully and differently elaborate it – that consider lyric as responsiveness. Grossman has a scary, incisive model of Orphic vs. Philomelan origins of poetic power, Stewart an account of ‘lyric possession’. All these seem terribly resonant and extremely complex to me – accounts of ways we call, and are called, into being, speech, silence. But I also think of any lyric as implicitly choral, or as emerging out of some subliminal sociable chorus, some matrix we all swim in and sometimes ‘speak’ or ‘sing’ from. Fred Moten is brilliant on the sociality of lyric.

 

Allen:

I felt there were ecological concerns running through the book, a thread that often spools away from descriptions or feelings on ‘nature’ and concepts of it, and becomes bound up with ideas of capital, destabilized truths or threatened fact. I’m not sure when you started writing these poems, but some of them feel almost prophetic in their utterances. The early poem, ‘OK Let’s Go’, grapples with this in particular.

Every bankrupt idea
Of nature “you can’t write about

Anymore” said my friend
The photographer “except

As science”
Let’s enrol ourselves

in the school of the sky
where knowing

how to know
and unknow is everything

we’ll come to know
under what they once thought

was the dome of the world

I see the poems as working through certain historical ideas of the natural. You have written on, and have a deep love for, the Romantics, and I see an exploration of a Romantic idea of the world, while immersed in our contemporary, chemical-infused landscape. In a number of poems, like ‘Night Sky’, you almost offer a warning, how a ‘natural’ world could end up (and is arguably already within), bound up with language of sales, stocks and shares, sellable and without agency:

See the North Star kiss Mars
& Venus unveil her face
As admen brand the stars
And men sell shares in space

What was your thinking as you were working through this book on ecological spaces and how we position ourselves/walk alongside them?

 

McLane:

There’s a huge ecological preoccupation here, yes, which continues from my previous book This Blue. It’s hard not to think about this, if you’re sentient! And it’s hard not to feel crushed, or forced into either hysteria or apathy. In my teaching and scholarly life I read a lot of Romantic-era writers and contemporary scholars on Romanticism, and many of them write brilliantly about a longer ecological-critical horizon for modernity (Anahid Nersessian, Anne-Lise François); and then, too, I’ve long been interested in the so-called life sciences, orders of knowledge, how poetry engages that (from Shelley and Erasmus Darwin to now . . .). I guess I would say I think the Romantics a) are not ‘romantic’ in the sense of nostalgic or ornamental or residual, which too often they get read as, and b) they are still our contemporaries, in that aspects of their thought and reckoning seem newly salient and often predictive. Mary Wollstonecraft on ‘the rights of woman’, John Clare on enclosure, Mary Shelley on technophilia and hubris, and so on – I find these writers to be resources, not nostalgic residues. (Other poets clearly do as well: see Anne Boyer’s Rousseau and Wollstonecraft, Juliana Spahr’s Shelley, Lisa Robertson’s Wordsworth and Rousseau.) Also, there is no nature anymore, right? That is Bruno Latour’s point, and many others’ point – that this forcible separation of ‘nature’ from ‘culture’ or ‘Man’, or what have you, is a modern fallacy, and we’re now having to live through the horrible fall-out, though not under equal duress. I could go on and on about the Anthropocene, contemporary theorists, ‘Four Futures’, periodization, questions of futurity, men explaining capitalism to me, etc but I’ll spare you! But out of that matrix, and many other vibrations and matrices, came the poems of Some Say.

 

Allen:

I want to also talk about your book My Poets, a set of creative-critical essays on poets that have been important in your own life, which I love for so many reasons. I see it at this sort of intersection between biography, academic criticism, personal reflection and gossipy bit from poets’ letters. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the impetus behind the book? Some of the essays seem to be very personal, I’m thinking of the Louise Glück one in particular, that definitely hints towards an autobiographical thread. Did you find yourself writing the essays over an extended period of time, or did you realize that you had a group of essays that were relatively similar and then wrote the rest afterwards in the same vein? How did the book come about and how did you feel when you were writing something like this that’s such a hybrid text?

 

McLane:

Most chapters in My Poets are oriented to a particular poet, but they are also governed by my specific relationships to those poets. I choose these poets because they’re ones with whom I had some kind of intense readerly relationship, and the specific time of reading them constellated times in my life in ways that were very vivifying and marking. So one way to think about the contours of lived experience is, for me, to think about the contours of reading experience. The germs of the book were a few essays I had written, one in honour of the poet Fanny Howe. I had written a lot of reviews and critical essays for some newspapers and journals and literary magazines since the mid-90s, and I found that writing is enjoyable and valuable to do; and at a certain point I also wanted to be writing in some other keys. I was thinking about, or longing for, something in the vein of what Baudelaire called a ‘poetical prose’. And certain occasions gave me an opportunity to experiment with that – one was an event honouring Fanny, who was a poet I admire greatly and who has since become a friend. And I had written another essay on Emily Dickinson, which is probably – to use your terms – one of the least ‘personal-autobiographical’ in the book. But I began to think about this as an opportunity to pursue these conjunctions, to return to poets who had partly made me, to work in new modes combining reflection, ‘criticism’, autobiography, stylistic imitation, homage.

It was after I had written the ‘My Elizabeth Bishop/My Gertrude Stein’ chapter, ‘My William Carlos Williams’, and the Glück chapter, when I knew I had the possible core of the book. For me, part of the experiment and the excitement was finding adequate form for each juncture, and it was also important for me to be clear with myself and hopefully with readers that this wasn’t a book about the poets I think are the best in the world, whatever that means – and that’s not a conversation I think is that fruitful, although we could have that – but about those poets who catalyzed something in me or marked a time of life. So many poets who have meant and mean enormous things to me – Stevens, Wordsworth, Anne Carson, Lisa Robertson, etc. – don’t have their own chapters. It was really a form of life writing under the guise of criticism. It was very strenuous to write, in part because there was a set of formal decisions that had to be made chapter to chapter. For example, part of the pleasure for me of the Bishop/Stein chapter was getting to swim a bit in Steinian seas. And the proem, which is the opening gambit of the book, came very late. I really wrestled with ways to begin a book like this because, on the one hand, a loosely chronological arc is suggested from, say, late adolescence ‘til the late 90s, but I wasn’t sure quite how I wanted to begin, and then it occurred to me that the proper way to begin was a Q&A that distilled the logic of the book, which is a citational logic – the book is very much a tissue of quotation. That’s part of its stylistic logic and its ethical commitment, in that I don’t think in fact it’s more intimate if I tell you who I’m sleeping with than if I quote Wallace Stevens. Each of those speech acts is equally intimate to me. And part of the logic of this book is to put pressure on what we think the personal is; the ratios of those kinds of shadings shift from chapter to chapter. But it was an exciting and a draining book to write. And I think, also, it came out of my own multiple commitments as a poet and having written a fair amount of criticism, both in a more general key and in a scholarly key. One thing I did not want to find myself lapsing into was a merely instrumental prose. I felt like that is a temptation, and so this book was an attempt not to do that.

My Poets begins its first chapter ‘proem, in the form of a Q&A’, which is what you hear at the beginning of the recording. And (to locate the chapter we recorded), ‘My Elizabeth Bishop/My Gertrude Stein’ is the fourth chapter in the book, and it’s grounded in a time when I was in fact trying to write my undergraduate thesis on Elizabeth Bishop.

 

 

 

Allen:

The range of styles of writing is one of the things that makes it sort of gripping in its way. It reminds me of a program here called Desert Island Discs, where people choose the songs they’d take if stranded on a desert island. I don’t really listen to that much music, and having a book like this is a relatable thing for someone who mainly only reads poetry. There’s something about this book that feels fanatical. But you also run yourself alongside the poems and poets, and you see yourself and your own limitations, considering your own practice alongside what you’ve taken from those poets, there’s an honesty in how you write yourself into those poets’ lives and how you write those lives into your own.

 

McLane:

That’s absolutely true – you mean ‘fanatical’ like ‘enthusiasm’ in an eighteenth-century sense, right? As in: You need to purge that! I appreciate your characterizing it that way, because I was trying to hold open a sort of chiasmic transitional space between self and poet, self and poem, that I wanted the book to honour. And also I realise that a book called My Poets is a specialty item. Desert Island Discs is a perfect analogy: other people might want to think about, say, My Filmmakers or My TV Shows or My Pop Stars. What I feel is that enthusiasm or fanaticism is shareable, even if you don’t share exactly the objects or the particular passions that a particular writer or musician has. I’m always reading my way into other people’s interests – why not? It’s amazing. And there were some books that actually helped me, inspired me in various ways: Edmund White has a book called My Lives, with chapters like ‘My Women’, ‘My Hustlers’ and so on. That way of organizing reflection and experience was very appealing and it made a big impression. And then of course Susan Howe has a famous book called My Emily Dickinson, which is a fanatical, brilliant book that doesn’t overtly traffic in the personal at all. Mine is more of an autobiography, and that’s one reason that I was so happy the book was nominated in the autobiography category for the National Book Critics Circle Award, because they recognized that that was a powerful pulse in the book.

 

Allen:

I want to ask you rather crudely how you balance poetry and criticism, because I think that a lot of poets are quite frightened, perhaps worried, that the review will be critical, and there are a lot of critical writers who feel similarly about poetry. I could definitely see how My Poets feeds into your poems, that book is so much about poems as it is about poetics, but what about the element of your work where you review books critically?

 

McLane:

I don’t think of it at all as a daily or monthly or even yearly kind of balance. Nor do I think there’s some ‘critical compartment’ of my brain, you know, some kind of phrenological model of my mind. In a way, in all modes of writing, I’m following intimations, intuitions, lures. I can and do feel my aversions strongly, so if I start to feel an aversion I will honour that aversion. I have the privilege right now of not doing writerly things I don’t want to do. And unless I want to actually talk about a poet I’m not going to review a book. I’ve never written a review about something I didn’t want to talk about, and I learned enormous things from writing to deadlines, writing to word counts, but I feel like life is short and time is short and I only want to be doing things that are essential to me and, hopefully, for others.

For a long time I had the good, complex fortune of pursuing things in a possibly false but felt sense of preserved freedom. For me poetry was a space of freedom, it was not a space of sociability. Not that these need to be opposed, but I think they can feel opposed if you’re feeling particularly vulnerable or fragile. And I felt so strained by my graduate studies in English and American literature that it actually ended up being really good for me that the reviews I was writing, the poems I was writing, had nothing to do with that program. Of course, everything cross-pollinates, but for me that kept certain kinds of writing uncontaminated, and uninstrumentalized. That was so crucial for me to feel any kind of happiness in writing. I feel fortunate in that. Everyone has to find his or her own way to their happinesses and their engagements in writing. How do you feel about it?

 

Allen:

I think a book like My Poets is important and progressive as it is a result of allowing many ways of thinking about poems and writing to bleed into each other. I think it’s easy for writers to worry about where they’re placing their work or how their work fits with a larger or more accepted idea of what poetry is. And of course if you’re nervous or self-conscious, it will mean you perhaps don’t allow yourself to make strange or unexpected crossovers. And the weight of tradition bears on some people more than others.

 

McLane:

Do you feel the weight of tradition bears on people? I feel like the weight of cocktail parties weighs on people. I actually feel, frankly, if you need to carry a weight, carry the weight of tradition. Or tune into the many traditions out there. That’s partly just the trans-generational logic of human beings. This is why it really helps to read dead people. They’re still alive, they just can’t be at the fucking cocktail party, they can’t reject your poem. Thumbs up! Read excellent dead people. Don’t only read the people who are alive, are you kidding me? Also, let’s read in translation, and against our own inclinations. It’s a big world, it’s a big, mixed English, it’s a big instrument, you know, and some incredible poets are committed to degrading the instrument: that’s the way Cathy Park Hong talks about her poetry. There are so many – what is it? that wonderful phrase Maggie Nelson takes from the poet Dana Ward – so many ‘many-gendered mothers of my heart’. There are so many possible mothers and fathers of our heart and of our writing, and maybe 1% of them are alive.

 

Allen:

What is next for your work? Are you working on anything at the moment?

 

McLane:

What IS next for my work? Ah, not clear. At the moment I’m working on some poems for friends, as a kind of birthday present to myself and others, and I’m looking forward to more expansive reading in the coming months, and to some possible collaborations with musicians and visual artists. I’ll also be helping to select poems from my books for a Selected Poems due to come out from Penguin UK, likely in 2019: that is exciting. Overall, I think I am in a more receptive than overtly productive moment – we shall see!  It’s a weird moment, to say the least, so Wallace Stevens’s ‘How To Live. What To Do’ is much on my mind.

 

 

Photograph © Joanna Eldredge Morrissey 

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]]> https://granta.com/contributor/rachael-allen/ Fri, 30 Jan 2015 11:46:53 +0000 Rachael Allen is the author of Kingdomland (2019) and God Complex (2024). She was the...

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Rachael Allen is the author of Kingdomland (2019) and God Complex (2024). She was the recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award and an Eric Gregory Award. She was born in Cornwall and works as an editor and lecturer in London.

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]]> https://granta.com/about/ https://granta.com/about/#respond Fri, 30 Jan 2015 10:52:27 +0000 https://granta.com/?page_id=5145 Granta magazine and Granta Books share a remit to discover and publish the best in...

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Granta magazine and Granta Books share a remit to discover and publish the best in new literary fiction, memoir, reportage and poetry from around the world.

The magazine was founded in 1889 by students at Cambridge University as The Granta, a periodical of student politics, badinage and literary enterprise, named after the river that runs through the town. In this original incarnation it published the work of writers like A.A. Milne, Michael Frayn, Stevie Smith, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

In 1979, Bill Buford and Pete de Bolla transformed Granta from a student publication to the literary quarterly it remains today. Each themed issue of Granta turns the attention of the world’s best writers on to one aspect of the way we live now.

Granta Books came ten years later, originally setting out to publish six books a year, distributed and promoted by Penguin. The launch list included John Berger’s Once in Europa, Gabriel García Márquez’s Clandestine in Chile, Martha Gellhorn’s The View from the Ground and Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine. Buford later published Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories and books by Ivan Klima and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. He aimed to hold on to the editorial principle that had governed the magazine: to publish ‘only writing we care passionately about’.

In 1997 Granta Books was expanded by its previous owner, Rea Hederman, publisher of the New York Review of Books. He brought in publisher Frances Coady. The company gained its own sales department and quadrupled its publishing programme. Authors brought to the list included Jeanette Winterson, Edward W. Said, Linda Grant, Herta Müller, Iain Sinclair and Misha Glenny.

Publisher Sigrid Rausing acquired Granta publications in 2005, and expanded the list, keeping its high literary character. Present authors include A.M. Homes, Barbara Demick, Rebecca Solnit, Eleanor Catton, Ben Lerner, Madeleine Thien, Jenny Offill, Mark O’Connell, Lisa Halliday, Han Kang and Sayaka Murata. Granta launched a poetry list in 2019, under the direction of the magazine’s poetry editor Rachael Allen. The list includes prize-winning authors Will Harris, Daisy Lafarge and Holly Pester. Rausing is the publisher of Granta Books and Granta magazine. In September 2007, Granta joined the Faber-led sales force, the Independent Alliance. 

Granta Books now publishes around thirty new titles a year, providing authors with the intimacy of a small, passionate and creative team while consistently punching above its weight in review coverage, prizes, cultural impact and sales.

Granta magazine and the Granta Poetry imprint are owned by Granta Trust, a charity set up in 2019 to promote new and emerging writing. Sigrid Rausing chairs the Trust’s board. Her fellow trustees are the writers George Prochnik and Rana Dasgupta. Granta relies on the support of philanthropic donations from organisations and individuals. If you enjoy the magazine and would like to support the writing please consider making a donation.

Granta is most celebrated for its ‘Best of Young’ issues, which introduce the most important voices of each generation – in Britain, America, Brazil and Spain – defining the contours of the literary landscape.

Granta has published thirty-one Nobel Prize laureates.

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]]> https://granta.com/about/feed/ 0 https://granta.com/ https://granta.com/#respond Fri, 30 Jan 2015 10:51:54 +0000 https://granta.com/?page_id=5141   New Writing on Granta.com Essays & Memoir|Issue 169 Paper People Yun Sheng ‘Otome games...

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New Writing on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir|Issue 169

Paper People

Yun Sheng

‘Otome games are about women writing romance plots designed to please women – paper hubbies and their voice actors are just a conduit to make the experience more believable.’

Yun Sheng on the rise of virtual love in China.

Podcasts|The Online Edition

Podcast | Allen Bratton

Allen Bratton

‘This set of characters are simultaneously medieval kings and modern aristocrats.’ Allen Bratton on adapting the Henriad and his debut novel Henry Henry.

Fiction|Issue 169

Lin Yan

Cao Kou

Translated by Canaan Morse

‘They rented a room – a standard double, two twin beds with a nightstand between them.’ Fiction by Cao Kou, translated by Canaan Morse.

Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition

Doing the Work

Rachael Allen

‘We hated the tourists, but they were the reason we had jobs.’

Rachael Allen on working in a fish and chip shop in Cornwall.

Fiction|Issue 169

Piranhas and Us

Can Xue

Translated by Annelise Finegan

‘An enormous black form rose from the water. Uncle Feng told me in a low voice to run fast.’ Fiction by Can Xue, translated by Annelise Finegan.

Granta 169: China

Fiction | Issue 169

Tomorrow I’ll Get Past It

Yu Hua

‘Every time I tried to write more, it turned out to be a fruitless endeavor – I felt like I was trapped in a sealed room with no windows.’

Fiction by Yu Hua, translated by Michael Berry.

Essays & Memoir | Issue 169

Adrift in the South

Xiao Hai

‘Finally! I thought. Now I get to work in a big factory. I was fifteen and a half years old. I was a child laborer.’

Xiao Hai on coming of age in the factories of Shenzhen, translated by Tony Hao.

Fiction | Issue 169

Black Pig Hair, White Pig Hair

Yan Lianke

‘Are you here to accept punishment on the mayor’s behalf ? This is a great opportunity. People burn incense for a chance like this.’

A short story by Yan Lianke, translated by Carlos Rojas.

Fiction | Issue 169

Speedwell

Zhang Yueran

‘Fiction is a kind of spell, I said, and analysing a story is an exorcism. It loses all its mystery.’

Fiction by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang.

Fiction | Issue 169

Hunter

Shuang Xuetao

‘Lu Dong is a fifth-rate actor – that’s by his own ranking system.’

Fiction by Shuang Xuetao, translated by Jeremy Tiang.

The Vegetarian

Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith

Winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature

Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more ‘plant-like’ existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares. In South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye’s decision is a shocking act of subversion. Her passive rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, leading her bland husband to self-justified acts of sexual sadism.

Fraught, disturbing and beautiful, The Vegetarian is a novel about modern day South Korea, but also a novel about shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.

£8.99

Buy Now

From the Archive

Fiction | Issue 68

Call If You Need Me

Raymond Carver

‘She watched me as I wrote out a cheque for the three months’ rent. Later, back at the motel, in bed, she lay with her hand on her forehead and said, “I envy your wife.”’

Fiction by Raymond Carver.

Fiction | Issue 19

Knives

Louise Erdrich

‘It is time, now, for Karl to break down with his confession that I am a slow-burning fuse in his loins. A hair trigger. I am a name he cannot silence. A dream that never burst.’

Fiction by Louise Erdrich.

Fiction | Issue 127

A Clean Marriage

Sayaka Murata

‘Frequency of sex since marriage: zero.’

Sayaka Murata on a sexless marriage and the ‘Clean Breeder’ technique for pleasureless reproduction.

Highlights From Granta Books

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Study for Obedience

Sarah Bernstein

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Blackouts

Justin Torres

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The Glutton

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The Dimensions of a Cave

Greg Jackson

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An Ordinary Youth

Walter Kempowski

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Nature's Calendar

Kiera Chapman,Rowan Jaines,Lulah Ellender,Rebecca Warren

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Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare

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Recommended Reading

Fiction | Issue 168

The Museum Guard

J.M. Coetzee

‘Do they strike people as a strange couple? He does not know, does not care.’

Fiction by J.M. Coetzee.

Essays & Memoir | Issue 167

Where the Language Changes

Bathsheba Demuth

‘I am on the hunt for the Russian Empire, or what traces might still exist of its colonial enterprise.’

Bathsheba Demuth travels the Yukon river, following the history of the fur trade and the Nulato massacre.

Art & Photography | Issue 165

Have a Good Trip with Trabant

Martin Roemers & Durs Grünbein

‘Question: ‘What do a Trabant and a condom have in common?’ Answer: ‘Both decrease the pleasure of the ride.’’

Durs Grünbein introduces photography by Martin Roemers.

Essays & Memoir | Issue 166

Lifetimes of the Soviet Union

Yuri Slezkine

‘Bolshevism, like most millenarian movements, proved a one-generation phenomenon.’

Yuri Slezkine on Soviet history and the generational arc of revolution.

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News, Prizes and Events

Prize

When I Sing, Mountains Dance and Chilean Poet Shortlisted for Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize

When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Sola (trans. Mara Faye Lethem) and Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra (trans. Megan McDowell) are both shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

Prize

Our Share of Night Shortlisted for The Kitschies

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez (trans. Megan McDowell) is shortlisted for The Kitschies Red Tentacle award, awarded to speculative, sci-fi and fantasy novels.

Prize

I’m A Fan Wins a British Book Award

I'm A Fan by Sheena Patel wins the Book of the Year: Discover Award at the British Book Awards.

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]]> https://granta.com/home/feed/ 0 https://granta.com/introduction-fate/ Thu, 13 Nov 2014 22:56:35 +0000 https://granta.com/?p=11571 The last time I wrote about fate was in an article for the Guardian on...

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]]> The last time I wrote about fate was in an article for the Guardian on addiction, two years ago: ‘There is some evidence for a genetic disposition,’ I wrote, ‘but it’s not straightforward. Genes do not map out one’s fate; they map out possibilities of fates.’ But perhaps, as in the classic fate narratives, I am deluding myself, blithely unaware of how narrow our choices are, how genetically and socially predetermined our lives.

The pieces in this issue are concerned with fate in its most serious manifestations: love, sexuality, identity, death, illness, religion and war. We have new writers, S.J. Naudé and Sam Coll, alongside established ones, Will Self, Cynthia Ozick, Louise Erdrich, Tim Winton and Kent Haruf. We are publishing four poems, by Mark Doty, Adam Fitzgerald, Barbara Ras and Mary Ruefle, chosen by our new poetry editor, Rachael Allen.

We also have a piece by a writer long since dead: an essay on Sarajevo by Joseph Roth, written in 1923, translated here by Michael Hofmann. Given the centenary, I wanted something in the issue about 1914 and the war that was supposed to end all wars. We read Roth’s description of Sarajevo, aware that he is thinking backwards, to the war, while we think forwards, to the second war, to the Bosnian war, to the atrocities and the occupation. That hidden kernel of the future, our knowledge of what is to come, speaks to fate.

The issue is not all serious – the extract from Miranda July’s forthcoming novel is genuinely funny and so, in its own way, is the piece by new Irish writer Sam Coll – but it’s probably true that the tenor of this issue is melancholy rather than light-hearted. Thus Cynthia Ozick’s captivating new story describes the tragic fate of the illegitimate daughter of a Jewish trader in ancient Greece. ‘Domain’, our lead story by Louise Erdrich, is about life after death in a hyper-digital age, written with the deft and warped veracity of all great science fiction. Will Self channels J.G. Ballard’s last days in a surreal and poignant meditation typed on Ballard’s own typewriter. Tim Winton writes movingly about his fear of hospitals. S.J. Naudé, the other new writer in the issue, describes a former nurse going for Aids training in the South African outback. Naudé writes in Afrikaans, but like many Afrikaans speakers he is bilingual, and translates himself into English. There is something reminiscent of J.M. Coetzee in his language, and in the vision of the fate of South Africa, hanging in the balance.

When I thought about this theme I felt that the contemporary discourse on sexual and gender identity must be part of it. Here, writer and academic Andrea Stuart describes, for the first time, her own transition to lesbianism. Her story is a measured defence of preference over destiny, of fluidity and of experimentation.

The transgender discourse has taken much of its narrative frame from the gay rights movement. Mark Gevisser is a South African writer, who is working on a project researching the Global Sexuality Frontier for the Open Society Foundations. We met and talked about the rise of transgender identity. It seems to me – Mark I think only partially agrees with this – that the idea of the simple structural opposite (the boy inside the girl’s body, the girl inside the boy’s body) might be temporal and fleeting, and that we don’t yet quite know how the model of gender identity will settle. But we do know that in at least some circles in America the gender you are born with is no longer assumed to be the gender you are destined to live.

The issue ends with Kent Haruf describing how, against significant odds, he became a writer. It is in some ways a narrative of anti-fatalism, or at least a story of self-determination – a good ending, I thought, and an oblique answer, if we need one, to the question of fate.

 

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]]> https://granta.com/frozen-chicken-train-wreck/ https://granta.com/frozen-chicken-train-wreck/#respond Mon, 14 Oct 2013 13:34:56 +0000 Frozen Chicken Train Wreck is a book of reproduced tabloid posters from daily newspapers – The...

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Frozen Chicken Train Wreck is a book of reproduced tabloid posters from daily newspapers – The Star, Daily Sun, The Times and others – that have been displayed on roadsides in South Africa since the First Anglo-Boer War. Laurence Hamburger has been collecting them since 2008, and a selection of these make up the book recently published by Chopped Liver Press and Ditto Press. Here, he answers questions for Rachael Allen about the concept of the book, why he started collecting the posters and offending everyone.

RA: Could you tell me a little about why you decided to start collecting the posters?

LH: I think it’s very important from the outset to state that I’m not the first person to collect posters of this kind in Johannesburg. There are a couple of famous bars, like The Radium, who have some on their walls, some from as far back as the emergency years, and many others – journalists, artists and students – that I know have a few choice ones hanging in their homes. They have become kitsch, part of a certain South African pop culture. All I’ve done is collate a series of them and show something of the experience of reading them in sequence. I began to see that there was a kind of pattern that could at some stage be curated in an interesting way. I first used the collection when I filmed a series of them in an animation in six locations around Johannesburg. I was, at this point, creating live visual backdrops for a band, the BLK JKS, and I suggested using the posters as a piece for a part of the performance. That was with Mpumi Mcata from the band, and Liam Lynch, a photographer. Initially Chopped Liver Press and I discussed the book as a series of these stills, but Liam wasn’t interested in that as a project and so through discussions with Chopped Liver the book, as it exists now, evolved. I’m very happy with this choice to ‘recreate’ the posters. I think it was the best decision in terms of reflecting their design qualities, and letting the reader experience them in a fairly pure way. They feel the most archival, but ironically the most alive.

But to be less obscure, my reasoning for collecting was that I felt they made an appropriate narrative of a kind of South African vox populi.

Vince Pienaar, Copy Editor at the Daily Sun said that the posters were ‘the perfect marriage of a corrupt society and a progressive constitution’. What were you hoping to show in gathering them all together – and at what point did you realize their relevance as a marker for a historical context?

I’d returned to South Africa during the FIFA World Cup in 2010 to research another book on township pop records and had collected the odd poster over the years, and it was during that period that I began to think of putting them together. It wasn’t just the individual posters but the sequencing that became the trigger. Read in groups, they really seemed a different way to reflect the ‘temperature’ of the place, which I was maybe noticing more acutely then, having been away for the best of part of a decade. I think it was a simple revelation, a result of feeling a little like a tourist in my home town for a while. It was only when I finally came to look through them, and there were about fifty, that I saw how much had actually ‘happened’ in South Africa. There was such a vast variety of political drama and social transformation that it was like a film script in the making. I’m a filmmaker and I suppose I just saw stories, and the new stories created from throwing groups of stories together. Also, as a student in the early nineties I had a conversation with my late friend Paul Botha (now the subject of the novel False River), about one poster hanging in a friend’s kitchen. He was a very sharp guy – a poet – and I clearly remember him explaining the word-craft required to do this kind of thing and how at its best, it reflected the unique quality of South African speech that was often absent in South African English literature. I suppose they were part of a broader process of turning me on to what was uniquely South African. We are still a very young culture and we have suffered from great insecurities as to what we are and how we have been formed. These posters are a kind of reassurance that we are no longer a mere colonial afterthought or, worse, a form of the USA with the sound turned down.

There is so much that happens in a week in South African society. It is a pretty rich source of ‘content’ journalistically speaking, more so than, let’s say, Sweden, where the society has been stabilized over the centuries and is now capably managed. This place is still in upheaval and has experienced such radical social trauma – one example being the number of rape crimes committed daily – and that the news in many ways is almost unbelievable and unbearable. Increasing amounts of this daily trauma was reflected in the posters.

I could see a change from the content a decade ago – they had become more relevant to the ordinary person and their experiences here.

Also, most people I know collected the posters that had their names on them – Clinton, George, Jacob – so were personally relevant, or because of a great political pun (‘the NP [National Party] loses its Virginia’), but I began to collect posters with the larger picture in mind. So posters like ‘Missing Baby: Woman Held’, which might not be so amazing in the hipster bedroom, were very good for my purposes, because it could function as part of a grander narrative.

Which poster is your favourite?

It’s always changing. We’ve been thinking of what to do with them now, and so the topic always comes up. This week I like ‘Tree Kills Tree Expert’ for its sheer surreal, droll humour. I just love the whole idea of a tree having a personality. ‘World Loses Hop[e]’, only because you know someone had that one banked waiting for Bob Hope to die. Many of these would hang in my film offices for weeks until we replaced them, some of the more popular ones were: ‘No More Mrs Nice Guy’, and ‘Karate Goat Hates Me’, which is as surreal as a newspaper headline could get, I reckon. I do love ‘All Blacks Are Brilliant’, which was the working title of the book. It has the potential to offend everyone.

Is there a poster that you drove past and never stopped to pick up but wish you did?

When I initially started I thought I would complete this project in a week or a month at best. I expected to find all of the posters in the newspaper archives and the printers. Both sources had nothing. I was quite shocked and that’s when the project became a matter of action, and a matter of having to stop and collect. So often I have missed ‘classics’ because we had to go to a meeting, or were chasing light on a shoot. Sometimes I would try to remember where they were and attempt to go back and collect. Often it was too late and they had been changed or someone else had taken it. Maybe I’m so crushed by missing some that I cauterize myself and forget what they’ve said, because right now I can’t think of a single one. There was one recently, about a dancing gay pastor that I can never remember the exact phrasing for, but I remember being disappointed I didn’t get it.

‘The ones that never got published’ is the real list I’d love to make. One of the copy editors told of how they were stopped from using ‘Oscar Will Walk’ after it looked like the detective had blown the Pistorious case in the first few days of the trial.

All images courtesy of of Laurence Hamburger

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