This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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Posts Tagged: granta
This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...more
Looking for Ghosts: A Conversation with John Freeman
John Freeman discusses his debut collection of poetry, Maps, displacement, empathy, and trying to find a way forward in the nation and the world.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Transit Books
The founders of Transit Books discuss Wioletta Greg’s debut novel, Swallowing Mercury, and the challenges and rewards that come with starting a small independent press.
...moreThis Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
For the rest of this month, Granta will be publishing the winners of the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, awarded to five writers from five regions of the globe, with the mission to connect storytellers across cultures through the power of fiction. This week’s featured winner is “Drawing Lessons” by Anushka Jasraj, from the Asia […]
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #81: Chanelle Benz
Chanelle Benz’s debut collection, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, is filled with characters often facing a moral crossroads. The stories contain the unexpected, like a classic Western complete with local brothel as well as a gothic tale. Benz’s writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Guernica, The American Reader, and Granta.
...moreThis Week in Essays
At Granta, Deepti Kapoor’s observations on traveling the world draw her closer to home. At The Rumpus, Kaylie Jones writes on the ripple effect mental illness has on a family grappling with a loved one’s struggles. Danielle Jackson traces her literary heritage and the guideposts who helped her along the way for Lit Hub.
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The Rumpus Interview with Patrick Ryan
Patrick Ryan discusses his new collection The Dream Life of Astronauts, the “bad old days,” and the human need to believe that everything will turn out okay in the end (even when we know it won’t).
...moreCheck out Any Time You Like, but You Can Never Leave
Do you think he stood her up? At the altar I mean? Or left her afterwards? Or she found out he was having an affair? Ollie seems almost gleeful. Unhappy visitors cheer him up. I think they make him feel less alone. They remind him that you don’t have to be dead to be pathetic. […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Max Porter
Max Porter discusses his debut novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, literary genres, and the changing roles of editors.
...morePorn is Complicated
There’s been a lot of thoughtful criticism on porn, written by women, recently—notably, Katrina Forrester in the New Yorker and Natasha Lennard in The Nation. For Granta, Andrea Stuart choses a unique angle in her own piece on porn, writing a genre-bending essay that can best be described as a reported piece of first-person criticism. After positioning herself in the feminist […]
...moreBuddha Bowls and Wine for All
At Granta, Eliza Robertson imagines a maenad from Greek mythology as a listless California nymph in a supremely weird and imaginative story: They light Nag Champa incense and sit on the Moroccan floor cushions they bought instead of a couch. Though she normally finds comfort in their living room, tonight it feels like a poorly attended party from […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Granta’s summer issue is themed “The Legacies of Love,” and in a new story from the online issue, Glasgow-based writer Sophie Mackintosh strips love back to its animal bones in a story that is less rom-com and more Hunger Games, but without the love triangle. Murder class was the new thing, but of course they […]
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This Week in Short Fiction
One of this year’s highly anticipated new novels is Jesse Ball’s How to Set a Fire and Why, forthcoming from Pantheon in July, about an intelligent and troubled teenage girl who takes an interest in arson. A standalone excerpt in Granta this week, titled “Lucia Series,” gives us a small taste that involves no fire, […]
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The Big Idea: John Freeman
John Freeman, Executive Editor at Lit Hub, talks with Suzanne Koven about his new print-only literary magazine Freeman’s, the difference between between criticism and editing, and his fear of flying.
...more(Almost) Meaning
Over at Granta, Greg Jackson thinks about fiction in contrast with nonfiction, and how writers choose to write fiction precisely because they do not know exactly what they want to say, although it is expected that they do and are hiding it. He goes on to explore the process of achieving meaning, or at least […]
...moreBen Marcus Glad He Isn’t An Anthropologist
Author George Saunders interviews Ben Marcus about reading for the “mechanics” of short stories, and how to “reverse engineer” these mechanics in order to construct original work. In addition, Ben Marcus shares what he learned about the state of the “American ” short story while reading for his recent anthology, New American Stories: I’m pretty glad that I’m not an […]
...moreAmerican Horror Fiction
How we ended up in those backwoods hills was Iris said we needed to ‘get a little air,’ and Dolan added, ‘country air!’ and that was that. Iris was my lover, and Dolan was her roommate I’d never liked. All of us were alive, at that point. Lincoln Michel has a new short story, “Dark […]
...moreThe Pause That Does Not Refresh
You hear a lot about hot flashes, but hot flashes are the least of it, totally inconsequential in every way: you get as hot as a steam iron at odd moments – so what? The media would have you believe that hot flashes are the single most significant symptom toward which you should direct your […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This is the week of fantastical fiction, of the weird and the magical, of re-imagining fairy tales and urban legends, of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. On Tuesday, a new edition of Angela Carter’s seminal 1979 story collection The Bloody Chamber was released to mark what would have been Carter’s 75th birthday, […]
...moreLagos, Revisited
Alexis Okeowo expounds on Lagos for Granta—where it’s been, where they’re going, and why it’s future, our future, is dependent on its progress.
...moreWriting After 40
If the lists are to be believed, the only good new writers are under 40. It’s not just Buzzfeed, but also the New Yorker, Granta, and others who publish lists of great new—and young—authors. Joanna Walsh takes issue with this trend over at the Guardian: Sometimes the literary bitcoin is just life: some people have […]
...moreIf It’s Not One Thing, It’s A Mother
My mother stood before me in her quilted bathrobe, dark hair held back in a ponytail, her eyes sunken, grey. I felt like the narrator of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, who, startled out of sleep, opens his eyes to behold the monster reaching out to him: ‘the miserable monster . . . held up the curtain […]
...moreYou Don’t Finish Anything, You Just Turn Away
Over at Granta, Sam Lipstye and Diane Cook chat about spontaneity, artistic permanence, and how time travel’s actually a bit of a burden: I would love to make minor adjustments to most of the sentences I’ve put out into the world. Major adjustments as well. Why not? It’s not that I would make them better. […]
...moreProfile of “Pangaeic” Writer David Mitchell
Fans of Cloud Atlas, a sextet of sweeping stylistic range, know well that Granta-recognized author David Mitchell has a knack for mimesis. But they may not know that he is also “uncommonly good at imitating nonhuman noises.” In anticipation of his new “psychovoltaic” novel, The Bone Clocks, Catherine Schultz walks with him through the Irish […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
The news of Michael Brown’s death cannot be ignored. When one of our young people dies from shots fired by a police officer, there will be sadness and confusion. There will inevitably be questions, and questions left unanswered will lead to anger. This is a week, perhaps, when we need fiction and art to help […]
...moreInterrogating Adrian
Over at Granta, Francisco Vilhena interviews Adrian Tomine, the artist and illustrator responsible for bringing us Shortcomings, Summer Blonde, and any number of illustrations for the New Yorker. Tomine riffs on the origins of his stories, landing a job in pre-9/11, and the dynamics of imperfection: I’ve heard people mention – and sometimes criticize – […]
...more“Firecrackers and Wedding Music”
Granta has a stirring excerpt from Maria Choudhuri’s forthcoming memoir Beloved Strangers, about growing up in the capital of Bangladesh and then moving to New York. The excerpt starts to explore the topic of her parents’ arranged marriage and what it meant for her mother to trade in a music career for a domestic life in […]
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