Photo by Elina Simone.

Our latest instalment of podcasts for our Best of Young British Novelist features Adam Thirlwell. Thirlwell is the author of the novels Politics and The Escape, the novella Kapow!, and a project with international novels that includes an essay-book, Miss Herbert and a compendium of translations edited for McSweeney’s. He was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists back in 2003. Here she spoke to Granta’s Yuka Igarashi about sex, history, translation, using tempo in novels and how his writing has evolved over the past decade.

Detail from illustration by Tomer Hanuka in Granta 122: Betrayal.

André Aciman is the author of the memoir Out of Egypt, the novels Call Me by Your Name and Eight White Nights and numerous essay collections, most recently Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere. He is currently distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York. His new story, ‘Abingdon Square’ appears in Granta 122: Betrayal, published this week — in fact, it was an impetus for the issue’s theme.

In this week’s podcast, Aciman reads from the work and speaks to Granta’s Yuka Igarashi about the story, the problem with unreliable narrators and modern poetry, and why self-deception and betrayal are good subjects for fiction.

We were sitting at the pub down the street from the office. We’d just printed out the Book – a whole manuscript of The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists – and sent it off to the proofreader for final checking. It was Friday afternoon, and we were ready to celebrate. We’d spent weeks glued to our desks until all hours of the night, poring over pages and staring at our screens, fielding queries from fact checkers and comments from translators and changes from authors. We’d met our deadline. The issue looked good.

Still, my head was full of tiny, miscellaneous, lingering concerns: Would ‘upon’ be better if capitalized in a title? Should a washcloth be described as hanging inside out? What’s the best translation ‘Why are we still talking about typos?’ for xoxota: ‘cunt’ or ‘pussy’? Can a city be dust-covered and windy at the same time? Have we been consistent in the way we punctuate maté, Sugarloaf Mountain, the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, the Candidates Tournament for chess and every one of the numerous international airports mentioned in the stories? Is it possible for a headless chicken to stare at you? Does ‘shithole’ have a hyphen in it?

For the weekend, at least, I could put all these thoughts aside. It was lovely to be able to relax with colleagues.

There was talk of ordering some food. I looked down at the sandwich menu: kiln smoked salmon and horseradish chive creme fraiche in toasted wholemeal bread. ‘Kiln smoked’ probably should be hyphenated, I thought – it’s acting as an adjective modifying smoked salmon – and ‘creme’ needs the accent. Also, does ‘in’ make sense here? Wouldn’t it be better if it was ‘on’? Was this some kind of innovative sandwich that involved salmon being placed inside the bread?

‘Why don’t we share some appetizers to start?’ one of us suggested.

‘Redundant,’ I muttered to myself. Appetizers are starters; either cut ‘to start’ or change ‘appetizers’ to ‘plates’. Then again, in some cases, people order only appetizers, and don’t go on to have a main course. So was it actually essential to say ‘to start’, to clarify that, in this instance, everyone should feel free to order more food after the first sharing course? I wasn’t sure.

I tried to concentrate on the actual conversation. The topic, it seemed, was the new Batman film.

‘It has a spelling mistake in it,’ someone said. ‘There was a shot of a newspaper headline. Spelled “hiest” instead of “heist”.’

‘Christ. Multimillion-dollar movie.’

‘Seriously. It was pretty hard to concentrate on the scene after that.’

And so we fell into another version of an old discussion, one that I’m sure is repeated all the time in editorial offices and other nerd habitations around the world. We began to recite the usual litany of complaints against the un-copy-edited, ungrammatical text that pollutes our reading environments and disrupts our lives. The unnecessary quotation marks; the over-corrections and redundancies (between you and I, the reason is because); the nouns-used-as-verbs (to reference, to partner); the epidemic abuse of the word ‘literally’ to signify its opposite; the ubiquitous misplaced apostrophes. I felt enormous fellow feeling, self-satisfaction and relief as I explained how oppressed I am every day by a plaque hanging on a railing in my neighbourhood that I can’t help but stare at on my way to work: BICYCLE’S WILL BE REMOVED.

All heads around the table nodded in sympathy. Then, just as quickly, they began to shake with despair.

‘We’re freaks,’ one said. ‘Why are we still talking about typos?’

‘Are we ever going to be normal ever again?’

‘Have we been ruined . . . for life?’

Of course, the question is jokey, and more than a little smug, but it also contains a shred of seriousness and uncertainty. It’s not that we doubt that crystal-clear sentences, bulletproof I’m not willing to believe that attending to details or reading very carefully is ever a bad thing. editing and perfect grammar are crucial to an endeavour like Granta. That’s a given. But every time I descend deep into copy-editing mode – this microscopic, obsessive, question-everything, miss-nothing type of reading – I wonder if I am becoming less and less capable of simply enjoying text (or Batman, or sandwiches). I wonder if it makes me unable to see the bigger picture; I wonder if I am ruining beautiful dashes of prose by fussing over commas and consistency.

There is a danger to copy-editing. You start to read in a different way. You start to see the sentence as machinery. You focus on the gears and levers that connect words to one another; you hunt for the wayward semicolon, the unintentionally ambiguous phrase, the clunky repeated word. You even hope they appear, so you can kill them. You see them when they’re not even there, because you relish slashing your pen across the paper. It gets a little twisted.

As with any kind of technical knowledge or specialization, it is possible to take copy-editing too far, to be ruled by it, to not quite be able to shut it off when it ought to be shut off.

Ultimately, though, I don’t actually think it diminishes the pleasures of reading. The idea of a pure reading experience is a myth, anyway, because purity is a myth. I’m not willing to believe that attending to details or reading very carefully is ever a bad thing. A sentence is, in fact, a machine, an intricate and delicately balanced equation; good copy-editing – good editing more generally – is a way to help a writer get the equation so exactly right that it starts to not seem like one at all. Many times a day, I’ll be hunched over a paragraph, wondering whether a particular pronoun has the correct antecedent, whether one independent clause should be dependent, and suddenly I’ll be caught off guard by a stunning turn of phrase or find myself jolted by a perfectly articulated insight. The power that writing can have, at these times, far outstrips the power it would have were I merely a so-called casual reader. I might be a freak, and ruined for life, but I’m resigned to – no, happy with – this fate. ■

Photo by Daniela Silva.

A.M. Homes’s May We Be Forgiven began as a short story, published in Granta 100 in 2007. Six years later, it has become her biggest and most ambitious novel: a surreal, darkly comic epic that follows Harry Silver, Nixon scholar, through a transformative year in his life. From one Thanksgiving to the next, Harry’s journey takes him and various members of his family through hospitals, psychiatric wards, a Survivor-style experimental correctional facility, a swingers’ party in a Laser Tag joint, historic Williamsburg and a village in South Africa. Homes spoke to Granta’s Yuka Igarashi about the novel, her fascination with medicine and US-China relations.

YI: I wanted first to ask you about the word satire as it applies to this novel and your work. Reviewers have used this word but it doesn’t seem quite right. Would you use it to describe the book?

AH: No, I wouldn’t use the word. We live in a moment when reality itself is somewhat surreal. The oddity or the absurdity of everyday experience is part of what I’m capturing. My sense is that life itself can be so incredibly painful and disturbing that if one is to survive it, one has to find the humour in it.

I suppose the word satire is an attempt to describe the way in which I combine what is both serious and comic and am in fact commenting It needs to be a condensed version of life. The other day I likened it to the difference between grape juice and wine . . . or illuminating contemporary life. Writers like Joseph Heller, and his novels like Catch-22 and Something Happened, are the literary mentors of this book – and also very much the work of Harold Pinter and Edward Albee. There was a time you could write something that was reflective of the society and also funny, woven together in that way that didn’t have to be one or the other – but I think we’ve lost sight of that.

I’ve read that you think in terms of setting things ‘at a higher pitch’.

Part of that is a musical reference. Also, if I’m going to ask people to stop living their lives and pay attention to my work or my book, it needs to be a condensed version of life. The other day I likened it to the difference between grape juice and wine. If I spend seven years writing something I really hope it’s not grape juice. I want it to have both the distillation and the intensity and the specificity of wine.

This novel and your other writing insist that suffering is not meaningful. Even as the narrator, Harry, has a stroke or sees his life and family fall apart, he tells it in the most matter-of-fact way and it’s never pretty – it’s messy and awkward and often doesn’t make any sense. Do you think you’re rewriting the classic suffering-redemption narrative?

No, I don’t think in terms of that classic narrative. One thing that does interest me is the ways in which people often think of illness as punishment due, and seem baffled by it – as in, Why did God give me this sickness? I am a good person. I don’t think people bring illness upon themselves – although clearly there are behaviours, like drinking too much, eating too much – that we engage in which do bring certain diseases.

I don’t want to make suffering a positive (or negative); I very much want to acknowledge it without judgment. It’s neither a positive nor a negative. It’s there and it’s just real.

There’s a Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, who has a book called Start Where You Are. Her idea is that you don’t have to wait for the moment to start living your life differently or to move through your pain differently. You know how we all say, oh, I’ll start doing that after Christmas, or I’ll start doing that after I solve my problems? But you don’t have to be in a specific frame of mind or a right place to begin to address those things.

In the case of your book, it seems like there are events that precipitate Harry’s transformation, his suffering does lead him to something – but somehow it doesn’t seem fated or noble.

I would venture to say that it’s a very Christian or even Catholic concept to say that you bring suffering upon yourself. I tried to avoid that.

Granta just published a Medicine issue, so we’ve also been thinking a lot about illness narratives, the stories people tell about themselves when they’re sick.

I’m actually working on a book about hospitals. Alain de Botton commissioned six writers to go into large-scale institutions. I chose New York Hospital in part because I wanted to see the wide variety of patients and staff – the anxiety of the patients who are ill, the banality of the people work there all the time.

It sounds like an amazing project.

I’ve had an incredible time. I’ve been following around the chief of neurosurgery, I’ve been in the operating room while they’re doing brain surgery. I can’t tell you how much I love it.

Among the questions that I asked everybody when I talk to them is: ‘Is there a health care crisis?’ And for everyone, from the head of the hospital to the patient sitting on a stretcher in the emergency room, the answer is yes.

I was curious about the recurrence of Chinese characters in the novel. Claire, Harry’s wife, is Chinese-American. Harry encounters an adopted Chinese Jew working in a synagogue, befriends the owner of Chinese restaurant and later the Chinese owners of a deli, the daughter of whom he employs to transcribe some Nixon tapes. He also eats an insane amount of Chinese takeout. What’s the reason behind all this?

It’s funny because nobody is asking me about it. Nobody is seeing it, and it’s important to me. There are several reasons. It goes back to a story in Things You Should Know, called ‘The Chinese Lesson’, which I think in some ways is the character precursor of Harry and Claire’s marriage. I find that often I begin to work out ideas in short stories before they come into a novel.

Then I actually published another story called ‘The Omega Point’ in One Story. That one weaves a lot of facts about the importation of Chinese workers to a mill in North Adams, Massachusetts, to break a strike at a shoe factory a long time ago.

Then there’s Nixon, who opened US relations with China. If you Google the background of that it was fascinating how delicately that had to be set up.

Moving forward, it’s forty years this year since Nixon resigned. China owns more US debt than any other country. All of our electronics, a lot of our clothing, are manufactured there. Our interdependence, or actually dependence, on China amazes me. It’s both the economic and also the social relationship between the US and China.

It’s really funny to see this kind of Pynchon-esque Chinese conspiracy hidden in the novel.

The Chinese woman working in a synagogue is a good example of what we were talking about earlier. To me, it’s hysterically funny, but is it satire? I wouldn’t call it that.

There are lots of writers in this book. Don DeLillo makes a few cameos, and then Richard Nixon turns out to be a secret writer of short stories. Do writers make good characters?

A lot of people pass through this book. Hiram P. Moody, who is the family’s money manager – that’s Rick Moody’s real name. And one of the law firms in the book is Herzog, Henderson and March.

DeLillo walks through because I adore his work. It’s a tip of the hat to him. Libra is about Lee Harvey Oswald, which is obviously tied to Nixon, because Jack Ruby, who shot Lee Harvey Oswald, at one point worked for Nixon. And DeLillo really does live in a New York city suburb that is exactly like the one I’m talking about. So when I have DeLillo in the hardware store, the real DeLillo knows where that hardware store is.

That’s the play of being a writer. I felt like I wanted to have a good time with this book.

I love the title of the book that Harry is working on: While We Were Sleeping: The American Dream Turned Nightmare ­ Richard Nixon, Vietnam, and Watergate: The Psychogenic Melting Point.

I love it too, and I keep thinking, why isn’t that a book? I love that it’s so long that it’s demented. It’s definitely the sort of title that someone would give a book that they’ve been working on for twenty years.

And how do you write a book, over so many years, which is so densely threaded and complex – and maintain such intense forward momentum?

You have a lot of caffeine and chocolate. It’s also a lot of editing and rewriting and compressing. For me, the compression comes from writing short stories. As you know, this started as a short story that just kept going. As much as it unfolds and slows down in some parts, if you start at the pace and that pitch, you’ve got to be able to keep it up.

The trick is layering things in there without people necessarily noticing. You don’t have to notice the Chinese people, you don’t have to notice that there are a lot of literary references, but if you do it adds fun and meaning.

To me it’s almost as if the book has the compression and intensity of a short story, but happens to be five hundred pages.

That goes back to the difference between grape juice and wine. If you let it sit for the right amount of time and add the right things and rotate the bottles in the right direction, hopefully it turns out not just drinkable but quite fine. ■

May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes is published Granta Books.

Photo by Juergen Frank.

Nicola Barker’s sprawling comic novels have received the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (Wide Open), been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (Darkmans) and earned her a place on Granta’s 2003 Best of Young British Novelists list.

Her characters are off-beat, damaged, wholly inimitable. Her new novel, The Yips, revolves around Stuart Ransom, a broke, unlikable professional golfer stuck in Luton in the middle of a perhaps career-ending losing streak; Valentine, an agoraphobic tattoo artist who specializes in inking genitalia; Gene, a metre reader/part-time bartender/cancer survivor and replacement caddie from a family of palm readers; Shelia, his wife and a Church of England priest; Esther, the golfer’s pregnant Jamaican manager; Vicki, her abrasive environmental activist/lawyer sister; Karim, an unlicensed Muslim sex therapist; Aamilah, his burqa-wearing young wife; and more. Barker answers questions for Granta’s Yuka Igarashi about her latest cast of characters and themes that emerge as they interact.

YI: How do you come up with your characters? Do characters come first in your writing, or do you start with a premise or scenes?

NB: I always start off with a basic premise for a book. In the case of The Yips it was the idea of a double act – the relationship between a golfer and his caddie. The book was meant to explore the delicate power balance in this kind of a relationship, Generally I start a novel and then the characters just keep on popping up. Sometimes they’re quite unwelcome. especially when the dominant power (the golfer) is doing badly in his career. I’m a huge fan of the golfer Tom Watson (he’s just such a gentleman – personifies everything I admire about the game, in fact about sports in general). I knew that he’d had a very strong relationship with a former caddie, Bruce Edwards, who died of ALS. They were together for years and were an amazing partnership. I was very moved by their story. So I guess the novel was intended to be fairly different at the start from how it panned out. In the book Gene, the caddie, works very little for Ransom, the golfer.

Generally I start a novel and then the characters just keep on popping up. Sometimes they’re quite unwelcome. I’ll sit back and think, ‘Oh! Hello? Who the hell are you?’ Jen, the barmaid, was exactly such a construction. She started off with a tiny role then ended up trampling all over the book.

On the odd occasion when I’ve used an actual person as the basis for a character, readers generally seem to find them more eccentric. Perhaps I just know a strange group of people. I don’t think I’m weird (in the same way a psychopath doesn’t think they’re a psychopath), I just think life is weird. In general I leave the weirdest things out. It’s a cliché, but life is always stranger than fiction.

The novel seems very much concerned with skin – what’s written or imposed on it (tattoos, the lines of the palm) – and, more generally, the ways a body can be afflicted and inflicted upon. Are you conscious of this as a thematic element in the novel?

The skin’s definitely one theme – especially in relation to the character of Valentine, who works with it and is obsessed by it. It’s the body’s largest organ, after all. But more broadly speaking I’d say the book is about the internal versus the external: how we appear versus how we actually feel. It’s a book about various kinds of mental toughness. The devices we employ to maintain our delicate equilibrium – be they sex, art (as in Valentine’s case), drugs, pop psychology, politics, faith . . . you name it.

Of course I love art and tattooing. I’ve spent many years obsessively watching those tattooing shows on Sky and attending tattooing conventions. But I wanted to take the tattooing idea to a It’s a book about various kinds of mental toughness. whole new level. Valentine’s art is very particular to her and highly evolved. Intellectual – political, even. Her work is all about female power, female creativity and the restrictions of the body. This was something I discovered as the book developed. To start off with, Valentine was just a tattoo artist, a skill she’d learned from her father. The complexities of that difficult relationship led the character into modifying – and broadening – her skills.

There’s this wonderful part of the book where Valentine, who is agoraphobic, puts on a burqa and feels safe enough to venture outside in it. A few of the characters, especially the women, talk about how confinement sometimes leads to control and freedom. I wondered if you thought this was true.

I think it can be true if this is a choice women freely make for themselves. If it is imposed on them (by either patriarchy or religion), then no. It’s just a cruel form of bondage. Having said that, women – people – will always find ways of celebrating confinement, even when it’s imposed on them by others. These are all issues I deal with in the book. Often it’s easier to express contradictory ideas through fiction because things can be both right and wrong and only the reader can decide what they ultimately think. Sometimes I can believe things that are the polar opposites of each other. It’s very confusing.

This book is full of meddlers, intervening where they don’t necessarily have to. They’re competing forces: some are trying to cause chaos and confusion (like Jen, the mischief-making barmaid) and some are trying to help, to bring about some kind of resolution (perhaps like Sheila). The hilarious – and somewhat tragic – thing is that neither succeeds. Do you intentionally work against plot expectations in your writing?

I don’t really know what plot expectations are. If you mean conforming to a set of ideas about how a story should flow, then no. I have no interest in that. There are plenty of other people out there who do that extremely well. But I would be bored by that kind of an agenda. It’s difficult to be original in the modern world. Everything’s been done before. But I approach my novels in the way you might approach a very complicated, three-dimensional puzzle. There are dozens of characters and narratives but there is generally a universal idea behind all of these conflicting forces which shapes and directs them. I have a mission, in other words. And I am an incredibly fastidious writer. I reread and rework things endlessly. Some people don’t take enough time or step far back enough to see the little sphere, the floating, coherent entity that I like to think I have created. Sometimes people do. I don’t mind either way, so long as the book has entertained or challenged, then I’m happy.

You were halfway through writing The Yips when Tiger Woods had his fall from grace. Many of your novels draw on contemporary events – Clear, about David Blaine’s public fast in a glass box by the Thames, was written almost simultaneously with the event itself. Does reality ever get in the way of your fiction? How do you make sure it doesn’t?

Reality poses a constant threat. Often I’ll be halfway through a book and then something huge will happen culturally which renders several years of hard work old hat. It’s soul-destroying. But I definitely write for now. This is always dangerous. But it’s part of what I enjoy. For example (on a very trivial level) my character Valentine has a distinct forties/fifties aesthetic. I started the book six or seven years ago when this was something unusual. Now it’s completely been-there-done-that. It’s galling, but you just have to shrug it off.

This novel is set in Luton; many of your novels take place in desolate areas of Britain. To what extent do you think of yourself as a British writer, writing for British readers?

I grew up for some of the critical years of my childhood in Apartheid South Africa (my family emigrated to Johannesburg when I was nine) so – weirdly – I’ve always thought of myself as someone who If the words aren’t flowing, I’ll just go and rearrange the cutlery drawer, then head outside to feed the squirrels. writes outside of the dominant culture; an outsider looking in. I have no interest in class (for example) which is generally a strong theme in British writing. I have no interest in ‘the middle classes’, books about writers, dinner party novels. I suppose this means I don’t really think of myself as a British writer. When I started out I’d call myself an American writer, because for me the process of writing was all about large spaces – isolation. These things have obviously changed over the years, but I only ever analyse them when I’m questioned about it. Otherwise I’m just doing something I love for myself.

‘The yips’ is defined as ‘nervousness or tension that causes an athlete to fail to perform effectively, especially in missing short putts in golf’. I couldn’t help apply this to writing – the idea that self-doubt can once in a while overtake and paralyse writers. Do writers get the yips?

Well I suppose that age old malady of Writer’s Block must be a suitable comparison! So yes, writers definitely do get the yips. I’ve never had it before. I tend to think of it (perhaps unfairly) as a slightly more masculine construct. It’s something you can indulge in if you have the time and the status and the money. If women can’t get one thing done they’ll generally do another. There’s always a nose to be wiped or a border to be weeded. I love writing, but is it the most important thing in the world to me? Am I changing the world with my scribblings? Do I want to be remembered after I’m dead? Heavens, no. If the words aren’t flowing, I’ll just go and rearrange the cutlery drawer, then head outside to feed the squirrels. ■

The Yips by Nicola Barker is published by Fourth Estate.

Image by Eamonn McCabe.

Léonie Hampton is an award-winning photographer whose book, In the Shadow of Things, is featured in the art showcase of the Britain issue. Hampton’s mother, Bron, suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and for a decade found it impossible to unpack the boxes that had filled her new home since the collapse of her first marriage. A few years ago, Léonie offered to help Bron empty the house; there was a tacit understanding that she would document the process.

In the Shadow of Things is the product of the months that Léonie spent with her mother as together they worked through the irrational rituals and behaviours that were dominating her life. It features Hampton’s original photographs alongside snapshots from family albums as well as transcripts of their conversations. She answers some questions for Granta’s Yuka Igarashi about her tender, mysterious and intimate portrait of a family.

YI: You were trained in documentary photography, and in your earlier work you’ve lived with and photographed families in France, Rome, Cuba and LA. Can you discuss what it’s like to have your family as a subject – and what it’s been like to have this work out in the world?

LH: In the case of In the Shadow of Things I saw the photography and work as secondary to the matter at hand: my family and I needed to try and face up to something that we were all hiding from. Being in someone else’s family was like trying to crack into an egg, whilst photographing my own family felt quite the opposite – more like trying to get out of the egg.

At the Museum of Everything, in north London, I read a caption by Grayson Perry about the artist Morton Bartlett’s work: ‘the transition of deeply held feelings into the glare of an audience can be a troubling one – a journey I identify with.’ Working with my mother, looking hard at her problems and trying to help her, while trying to make a photographic record of the process has been by far the most difficult thing I have ever done. However there would be little point in continuing to do this if it were purely troubling. The process of making the photographs has helped stagnant areas in my life and mind find ways to flow again. I also know that for my mother it’s important to her that the work may be a relief to other people burdened with their own secrets. Perhaps they might feel a slight relief to know there are other people like them in the world. At the same time this project has taught me to cherish the intense emotions created by confronting such a problem. These are what make us human, and in a sense these are my material.

It seems as if some of obsessive and ritualistic aspects of photography echoes OCD. Do you feel as if your art and your mother’s OCD are two sides of the same coin?

Yes I do. I think that is quite true. My mother was not always struggling in this way. I am the eldest child and remember quite clearly when she was in control. When the house was perfect. But there is that word: ‘perfect’. My father did not give much advice, hoping we would find our own way perhaps, but I do remember him once sitting me down telling me not to be a perfectionist. He thought it was the one characteristic to keep in check, because that perfect state does not exist, and that the failure of attaining it can destroy. My mother is an absolute perfectionist. Perfectionism and obsessiveness often go hand-in-hand. I think that many creative people are obsessive, and it’s often that element that takes the work to an interesting place. Some of the obsessions that channel into compulsive behaviour seem to me to be very destructive. Its like mismanaged and misguided obsession that needs an outlet. So yes, the photographs, the book – I see them as little ways of channeling my own deeply obsessive nature.

Along the same lines, your photography comes (at least partly) from the same impulse that drives your mother’s urge to hoard belongings, keep them packed. Are they both ways to preserve the past?

The holding onto the past, or the hoarding, is deeply echoed in photography as a medium. It is often characterized as collecting memories and freezing time. I am undecided as to whether I am doing this in my work. At points I certainly am. Sometimes I recognize that I am guilty of delaying my mother’s impulse to clear a room because I want to photograph it before it changes.

The format of the book seems integral to your vision: pages of uncaptioned photographs, intermixed with family snapshots and followed by transcripts from recorded conversations between you and members of your family. Did you know that you would be using all three when you started the project? How do you see the relationship between the photos, the snapshot and the transcript?

When I travelled in my early twenties I always used a sound recorder and a camera to plot my journey. So when I started photographing my own family I bought a new sound recorder to work with, initially to gather field recordings for sound installations. Soon I realized the conversations and domestic banter were interesting. In my first book dummy I tried to use quotes that would come on pages at certain points within the image sequence, but this did not work. The words broke the spell of the imaginary space I was trying to create with the image sequence, one that I had discovered by making a slideshow of the work for Foam Museum. Descriptive text tends to deflate tension. I decided that keeping the text and the images apart allowed different routes into my family’s world. I wanted to leave the book open for a layered experience of discovery. I like to allow a viewer to see the images with no information, and then return to them after reading the text. As for the archive, or snapshot sections, I hope they punctuate the book with a kind of emotional breathing space, by eluding to my mother’s past; times when things were different and her life was full of laughter and hope.

In the photos as well as the transcript, there is a delicate balance between revelation and mystery. Were you conscious about holding these two elements in tension?

I see a dichotomy at play where I am trying to be truthful, but it’s hard to be direct. So the language of the photographs is often indirect, secretive and clothed. I can recognize that I am hiding things. Things are not clear, not in focus. There are layers behind layers, reflections. I certainly do not want to be deliberately mystifying things. It’s more a sense of finding a visual language that reflect my own ‘unknowing’. I’d like to have been able to tell my story in a Nan Goldin or Richard Billingham-esque way – like a straight punch, raw and direct, but it’s not my character, nor would it have been right given the delicate balance that working with my mother demands.

The photographs often show the stark beauty of the landscape around the house. Do you think your work responds to ideas of British identity or British landscape?

My mother moved to the house in the middle of nowhere to ‘get away’ after the marriage to my father ended. Ironically, much of the woodland surrounding the house is owned by my father. For me this reveals something about English romanticism. We picture the countryside as being a pure thing of natural beauty, when actually it is laden with context and history. The English countryside is a human construct. Living in it does not automatically grant us escape. ■

All images from In the Shadow of Things, published by Contrasto in 2010.

More information at www.leoniehampton.com

Selected in 2003 as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, Rachel Seiffert has since published a collection of stories, Field Study, and a novel, Afterwards, and appears in the current issue of the magazine, Britain, with ‘Hands Across the Water’. Here Seiffert reads from this new piece of fiction and talks to to Yuka Igarashi about writing silences, the inescapability of history and the Troubles and learning to love her characters.

Photo by Michael Lionstar.

Rajesh Parameswaran’s ‘The Infamous Bengal Ming’ is one of the highlights of Granta’s Horror issue. Told from the perspective of a well-intentioned but bloodthirsty tiger on the loose from a zoo, the piece is a masterful feat of storytelling: shocking, funny, entertaining and poignant all at once. Parameswaran’s other stories – which have appeared in McSweeney’s, Zoetrope and The Best American Magazine Writing – are just as original and unforgettable. Now they’ve been collected and published together in I Am an Executioner: Love Stories. He answers questions for Granta’s Yuka Igarashi about his exciting debut.

YI: The settings and points of view in these stories are fantastically varied. One takes place in turn-of-the century India, another in the Andromeda Galaxy in the year AD 2319. What struck me, though, were the themes that repeated across these stories. I think they explore the gap between intentions and effect: we all mean well, but cause incredible harm anyway. How aware were you, as you were writing, of recurring motifs?

RP: This question reminds me of that Borges parable: ‘A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.’ This parable seems to suggest that if you are inclined towards certain themes, it is difficult to avoid them, regardless of your intentions.

These are tales of longing and devotion that just happen to include maulings, a botched surgery, stoning and impaling. What compels you to mix love with gore?

To be honest, I didn’t know these were going to be ‘love stories’ or that they were going to tilt towards violence until I’d finished them. I could tell you that love and violence are basic forces interwoven through all of nature and human affairs, and that’s why I mix the two – but to some degree I’d be approaching your question retrospectively, as a reader, so you should take that answer with a grain of salt.

The characters in your stories are often trapped by their circumstances, and by their own delusions about their circumstances. Even Ming, our tiger on the loose from the zoo, is still in some ways trapped by who he is. Is it fair to say that you’re interested in the idea of captivity?

You are suggesting that the stories are about captivity on a literal level, and also the ways identity itself can be confining and/or liberating. That’s I think you could say I am writing against the ‘standard immigrant narrative’ at times, but perhaps you could also say I am writing against the standard tiger narrative an interesting point, and I do think it’s there in the collection (although it would be difficult to measure to what extent this was a prior interest, and to what extent I discovered this interest through engaging with the stories). Also, of course, captivity and freedom are fundamental themes in American history and in literature broadly. Vladimir Nabokov says that Lolita was inspired by the story of an ape in a zoo ‘who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing every charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage’.

Your characters are also trapped inside their stories, and some seem to be trying to break free of them. ‘Metafiction’ can be a contentious word – do you see yourself aligned with other writers of metafiction?

I try to write stories that I feel are compelling, in the way that it feels necessary to write them. And sometimes the struggle over how to tell a story is just an unavoidable part of telling the story. I think this has been true of literature from every era – not just the literature that is traditionally considered ‘metafiction’. This self-awareness characterizes a lot of writers I admire, including Melville, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Borges, Poe, Shakespeare.

One of the stories, ‘Bibhutibhushan Mallik’s Final Storyboard’ seems especially metafictional, or at least seems to be a metaphor about writing. It focuses on a rivalry between a famous movie director, Jogesh Sen, and his underappreciated art director, Bibhuti. The question that emerges for me is: can Bibhuti work without Sen? Or: how much of storytelling is style, concept, framing?

That’s an intriguing read. It calls to mind the question of how you recognize poetry. Is poetry that which has meter, line breaks, stanzas or whatever? Or is poetry simply any work that makes you feel as if the top of your head were taken off, as Emily Dickinson said? You seem to be suggesting that the art director in this story thinks a movie is all about style; whereas the famous director Jogesh Sen understands that the only real test is whether you have taken the audience’s head off.

A few of these pieces feature Indian characters, but your background as an Indian-American informs the collection in more indirect ways. ‘On the Banks of the Table River’ is set in outer space, but it’s also an immigrant story of intergenerational misunderstanding. Do you feel like you’re consciously writing against the standard immigrant narrative?

I am mainly trying to write stories that have some urgency and force and that are not boring. Sure, I think you could say I am writing against the ‘standard immigrant narrative’ at times, but perhaps you could also say I am writing against the standard tiger narrative, or the standard outer-space narrative. These narratives often turn out to be useful not just for their literal but also for their metaphoric significance.

I read something about a novel-in-progress. As I understand it, it’s going to be about a community of outcasts who process a city’s garbage. What got you interested in this subject?

I got interested in this subject because I am interested in cities and in the richness of this particular setting. Beyond that, I’m reluctant to say very much about a project that’s still in progress. ■

I Am An Executioner: Love Stories by Rajesh Parameswaran is published by Bloomsbury.

Chinelo Okparanta was announced yesterday as the latest New Voice in our series, with her story ‘Runs Girl’. Granta's Yuka Igarashi asked her about the writers who have inspired her, the current crisis in Nigeria and what it means to be published in Granta 118: Exit Strategies. You can also hear Chinelo read and discuss her work this evening in Chicago.

YI: In ‘Runs Girl’, Ada has to make a terrible choice in order to help her ill mother. What led you to write this story?

CO: I had just returned from a visit to Nigeria, and my mother was suddenly suffering an illness similar to that of Ada’s mother. The doctors could not diagnose the illness. They brainstormed and conducted tests and stumbled over their hypotheses. I sat in the hospital room and found myself imagining what the situation would be like if it were all taking place in Port Harcourt, in the hospital there, with its unreliable electricity and hardly functioning machines. And what if my mother did not have the luxury of money? What if she did not have the luxury of better care? To what lengths would I go to help her? And so I wrote the story. It came out quickly once I sat down to write it.

The story ends with Ada hoping for forgiveness, but it seems to me that Ada is not to blame for what happens to her. Are the readers meant to differ from Ada’s opinion of herself at the end of the story?

I know people who will call Ada’s principles into question, who will exclaim, ‘She only had to put her faith in God!’ I know people who will view the situation exactly the way Ada’s mother viewed it, which is, ‘Why bring shame upon yourself? Why bring shame upon the family? Why bring shame upon me?’ I’m glad you see Ada as blameless. If she could only see it that way – if she could believe that of herself – she’d have a much easier life ahead of her.

‘Runs Girl’ sheds light on great disparities that exist in Port Harcourt – Ada’s family’s poverty is set against the wealth of oil men; her mother’s superstitions and religious piety contrast with the culture of ‘Yahoo boys’ and runs girls. Does this theme run through your writing?

Religion often makes its way into my writing. The oil men and Yahoo boys, not so much. Perhaps they are there more often than I think, but if so, they are certainly not as salient as in ‘America’ and ‘Runs Girl’.

Both ‘Runs Girl’ and ‘America’ – which appears in our Exit Strategies issue – touch on the country’s energy crises: the frequent oil spills that destroy the country’s ecosystem, the electricity outages. I wondered if you had any opinion about the recent protests over government fuel subsidies.

Well, I should first say that I was not there to see the protests for myself. I heard about them from cousins and aunts, and from my mother. This is the way I hear about most things in Nigeria these days – about the oil wars, the Boko Haram bombings and now the subsidy crisis.

As far as the subsidy goes, I’ve asked myself where exactly the money for it was coming from in the first place, and where exactly it was going. I’ve followed the event on the news with the intention of discovering these answers. But the answers – those given by Nigerian government officials – have been shady at best. Finance Minister These days, I’m more interested in the ways in which we sabotage ourselves. Ngozi Okonjo Iweala tells us that the subsidy money will be redirected to national programmes that will benefit the people. She mentions job creation, discusses the government’s intention to launch youth employment programs, their intention to put the youth to work. She lists services for maternal health, to combat child mortality, to combat women dying in childbirth. At first, it all sounds fine, but soon it begins to sound a little too theoretical, a little like a half-baked subsidy-removal defence. Essentially, what I worry is that if asked to produce the real details of the plan she will be unable. I suppose time will tell. I want to tell her that job creation programmes serve no purpose if the people cannot afford the transportation to get to the jobs. I also want to tell her that all the maternal health programmes in the world will be useless if the women cannot afford the transportation to get to them.

‘America’ is about a woman struggling with her decision to move from Nigeria to America. Her conflict is beautifully depicted: you see her caught between loyalty to her family and her own desires for the future. Was her story informed at all by your own move from Port Harcourt to the US?

I came when I was ten and a half years old. My father is an engineer. He came to pursue a graduate degree at Boston University and I came with him. So the story is purely fictional as far as the relocation goes, but it is true that Nnenna’s story was informed by other aspects of my life. Certainly this is true where family loyalty versus my own desires and hopes for the future are concerned.

Nnenna and Gloria’s relationship in ‘America’ is illegal and dangerous — same-sex couples are still outlawed in Nigeria — but I was really interested in Nnenna’s parents’ reaction to it. They’re not outraged or ashamed and they’re not in denial; instead they just seem disappointed about her not having children, sorry that she can’t be open about her love life. Were you conscious of writing a different kind of ‘coming out’ scene than is expected, at least in the West?

Back in 2007, there was a sort of poll taken to determine Nigerians’ attitudes towards homosexuality. I remember that the results showed that ninety-seven per cent of the population thought that homosexuality was wrong. Just last year, a law was passed making same-sex marriage a crime punishable by ten years in prison. The Muslims stone people caught in homosexual acts, at least that is their law. So, it seems that while Muslims and Christians in Nigeria are notorious for how well they fail to get along, this is one subject about which they appear to see eye-to-eye. I wanted to be sure to approach their resistance to Nnenna’s homosexuality from a practical perspective – one of fear, rather than one of hate. I think it’s unfortunate that both groups should agree where it concerns discriminating against and even punishing a certain faction of our society. It seems that sometimes we are far too willing to condemn, and then to make rules and regulations to enforce and reinforce our irrational condemnation. It truly is unfortunate.

In any case, in writing this story, I wanted to protect my characters a little from this mentality of condemnation. I wanted to make sure that none of them unwittingly reinforced an attitude of non-acceptance, or even hate. I wanted to be sure to approach their resistance to Nnenna’s homosexuality from a practical perspective – one of fear, rather than one of hate. And, I know that there is a small portion of the population that would see things the way her parents do, but they are perhaps trapped by fear, afraid to admit their acceptance in the polls. I wanted to show this fear in the story. Fear, rather than hate.

Can you say a little bit about how you came to write fiction? Is there a particular writer or book that has inspired you?

I took one or two writing classes as an undergraduate at Penn State, and I knew then that I enjoyed writing. But it wasn’t until graduate school at Rutgers that I gave myself permission to think seriously about writing fiction. And I began to, but always in conjunction with my career as a teacher: I knew what everyone said, you know, the whole idea of a starving artist. I didn’t want to starve.

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was very inspirational to me as a child. In a scary way. Indeed things do fall apart, and I find that I continue to obsess over the different ways in which they do. These days I’m not so concerned with the ways in which we’ve been sabotaged. These days, I’m more interested in the ways in which we sabotage ourselves.

Are you working on anything now? What is your writing process like?

I am working on a novel. I’m not very good at writing novels yet, so I spend most of my time just thinking about this novel. I spend most of my time just thinking in general. Anyway, one day I will write down all my thoughts for this novel. Not all in a day, of course. And when I do, I hope it comes out well. ■

You can read ‘America’ by Chinelo Okparanta in Exit Strategies or subscribe and receive four issues a year of the best new writing.

Chicago, IL
10 February, 7.30 p.m., Women & Children First, 5233 North Clark Street, Chicago, IL 60640

Granta’s New Voice Chinelo Okparanta joins local Granta author Nami Mun for readings and discussion of their work.

Photo by Thousandrobots.

Last November marked the publication of Don DeLillo’s first story collection, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories. These short fictions range from earthquake-ridden Greece to outer space, a white-collar prison and the streets of the South Bronx. ‘The Starveling’, which appears in Granta’s Horror issue, paints a haunting portrait of obsessive moviegoers in Manhattan. Here, DeLillo answers a few questions about the story and his new book for Granta’s Yuka Igarashi.

YI: The Angel Esmeralda collects your short stories from the 1970s until 2011 and can be seen as a primer into the recurring and evolving themes of your work. Do you think it is representative of your four decades of writing?

DD: The short story and the novel are so different in conception and execution that I don’t think it is possible to consider a writer’s work over four decades by examining the stories alone. The stories are representative of one slice of mind. The novels are mind, body, day and night, and what I ate for lunch.

Your latest story and the last in the book is ‘The Starveling’. It is included in our Horror issue and is about a man who spends all his days at the movies, crisscrossing New York and going from theatre to theatre. The story has a quiet surface but there is an incredible underlying tension and menace in it. Is there horror in this story, or in your other stories?

‘The Starveling’ is about an incomplete man and his acquiescence to a static life. The man’s refuge is the movies and in the minute-by-minute countdown of his days and weeks, there may be an element of horror; to the man himself, however, there is only the day’s schedule, and an abiding sense of being safe.

I read a conversation between you and Bret Easton Ellis in The Believer in which you talked about how you got started as a writer. You said something about quitting your job in advertising because you wanted to go to the movies. Obsessive moviegoers appear in your other work (Point Omega, for example). I couldn’t help wondering if there was an autobiographical element to the character in ‘The Starveling’.

Don’t believe what you read in interviews. (With the exception of this one.) There is no trace of my personal moviegoing experience in ‘The Starveling’.

Your collection often concerns people in trances, in states of repetition or fixation: astronauts orbiting the earth, a guy running laps in the park, a woman visiting and revisiting an art gallery. In ‘The Starveling’ there is this line: ‘There is a kind of uneventfulness that resembles meditation.’ Are these characters meditating? Why are you drawn to write of these trance states?

These characters are not detached from their surroundings; they’re not in a trance, they’re simply complying with the pattern of their lives, which (like all lives) entails frequent repetition with elements, at times, of obsession. The writer wants to find the pattern and transform it into something revealing or enlightening. ■

The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories is published by Scribner in the US and Picador in the UK. Click here to listen to Don DeLillo read from his story and discuss his work with Paul Auster and John Freeman.

Photo by Rak’s passion boy.

As we put together the print and online editions of Ten Years Later, we’ve come across an almost overwhelming variety of perspectives on 9/11 and the decade that followed. At times it seemed to me that across all arts and literature on every continent, we’re grappling with what it means to live in a post-9/11 world. Yet during our launch events and in discussions surrounding the ten-year memorial, I kept hearing the opposite view: we’re still waiting for a significant literary work about that day.

The complaint has been repeated so often that it’s virtually becoming a genre in itself. On every anniversary, in reviews of any book that takes on the terrorist attacks, commentators rehash the ‘9/11 syllabus’ (as the Daily Beast calls it) and tell us that it’s lacking.

Much of this talk has been directed towards novels. In 2005, Meghan O’Rourke wrote a piece in Slate about Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close that remarked: ‘You don't have to be a philistine to wonder who would want to read something made up about a day whose murky real-life implications we’re still coming to grips with.’ In 2007, USA Today reported that the non-fiction about the attacks far upstaged and outnumbered theOn the one hand, we depend on the novel to be comprehensive; we entrust it to mirror the whole of reality. On the other hand, we dismiss it as frivolous – something made up. fiction (1,036 to 30). Even as the years passed and the novels piled up, journalists and reviewers were unconvinced. Well, yes, here was a serious work that successfully takes on 9/11, they admitted about Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist or Ian McEwan’s Saturday. But it wasn’t the 9/11 novel. Dwight Gardner, in his New York Times Book Review article on Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, wrote that he’s looking for a ‘bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror’.

All this grumbling, I think, points to a simultaneous belief and doubt about what a novel can achieve. On the one hand, we depend on the novel to be comprehensive; we entrust it to mirror the whole of reality. On the other hand, we dismiss it as frivolous – something made up. Ten years on, it’s hard to know exactly what we’re looking for in the 9/11 novel. It’s hard to believe that such a thing will ever exist.

Meanwhile, a seemingly unrelated book – a three-volume, 1000-plus-page surrealistic thriller and love story set it an alternate version of Japan in the year 1984 – will soon see its much-hyped release in the US and the UK. Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 takes place far from the Twin Towers and has nothing to do with al-Qaeda. But it does tell us something about the processing of national trauma.

1Q84 is composed of motifs that any devoted Murakami reader will recognize. As in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, Sputnik Sweetheart and many of his other books, it begins with willfully independent but alienated characters leading somewhat stunted lives: in this case, fitness instructor/part-time assassin Aomame and maths teacher/would-be novelist Tengo. As is the fate of most Murakami characters, both stumble across portals to a parallel world, into which they descend to confront darkness and unspeakable violence.

What makes the new novel different from his previous work is that the centre of this dark underworld is a religious cult called Sakigake. Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 takes place far from the Twin Towers and has nothing to do with al-Qaeda. But it does tell us something about the processing of national trauma. The cult starts off a peaceful agrarian commune, whose members only seek an alternative to the capitalistic grind. Somewhere along the way, though, Aomame and Tengo find themselves in a parallel world, unleashing evil from within Sakigake. Aomame becomes involved in a life-threatening assignment involving the cult’s leader. Tengo lets an editor talk him into ghost-writing a story dreamed up by the leader’s runaway teenage daughter which exposes the group’s secrets and sends its members to silence him.

Murakami’s portrayal of Sakigake is far from realistic: among the strange phenomena he constructs around their world are tiny dwarf-like beings called Little People, cocoons made out of air, doppelgangers and an annoying, creepy ghost in the guise of a TV-subscription-fee collector. Still, it’s impossible to read any account of a dangerous cult in twentieth-century Japan without thinking of the real-life religious group Aum Shinrikyo.

In 1995, members of Aum Shinrikyo carried out a coordinated attack on the Tokyo subway system, releasing the poisonous gas sarin on five different train cars at the height of morning rush hour. They killed thirteen people and injured thousands of others. It was the deadliest incident aside from natural disaster that Japan had seen since the end of World War II, and – this should sound familiar – an act of terrorism that destroyed the country’s sense of itself as a safe and orderly society.

We know that the attacks loom large in Murakami’s mind, because he already wrote a book about it. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche was one of his first works of non-fiction, a compilation of interviews he conducted with victims of the attacks. (It was published in Japan in 1997 In this book, as in most of Murakami’s fiction, violence and genius and terror and mysticism reside in equal parts in the so-called heroes and so-called villains. It wells up and pervades us. We swim in it. and in English in 2000.) In the preface to the volume, he explains that he wrote it to counteract the Japanese media’s ‘slick, seductive narrative’ that focused on the Aum cult perpetrators and relied on ‘. . . the classic dichotomy of “ugly (visible) villains” versus “healthy (faceless) populace”’. The book is Murakami’s attempt to give each victim a face by filling in details of his interviewees’ background, home and working life, commute and routine before turning to their whereabouts and actions on the day of the incident as well as their situation and world-view in its aftermath. Despite, or rather because of its lack of judgment or conclusion, it’s a devastating read.

It would be nice, at this point, for me to be able to declare 1Q84 an answer to Underground – that if Underground cracks open the media’s slick narrative, 1Q84 puts it back together, as a coherent ‘wide-screen, many-angled’ story. And it would be comforting to imagine something similar in store for us and our own terrorist nightmare: that after years of probing past headlines, gathering the evidence, thousands of books filled with facts and questions, a novel would come along that made sense of it all and that marked some step forward in our collective healing process.

The truth, of course, is messier. 1Q84 doesn’t heal anything or ‘make sense’ of a terrorist attack. In fact, it doesn’t even mention terrorism. The book made me think about Aum Shinrikyo, and my guess is that Murakami has been thinking about it, too. But his new novel hasn’t clarified my thinking; it’s only made me feel more unsettled. In this book, as in most of Murakami’s fiction, violence and genius and terror and mysticism reside in equal parts in the so-called heroes and so-called villains. It wells up and pervades us. We swim in it.

The only thing 1Q84 can really tell us about the processing of national trauma is that there is no model and no timeline for it, that no literary package will deliver it to us. While we line up to buy this latest hotly-tipped release, as we hang around longing for a 9/11 novel to save us, it’s good to be reminded that we don’t go to literature for something. It can be said of novels in particular that they only give us something insofar as they owe us nothing. ■

1Q84 will be published in the UK on 18 October by Harvill Secker, and in the US on 25 October by Knopf.

This week on the Granta blog, we close the online edition of The F Word with one last feature on feminist bibles. Yuka Igarashi considers Grace Paley’s short stories and the relationship between art and activism.

When I moved across the Atlantic from New York to London last year, I brought my bike, my rice cooker and one paperback: The Collected Stories of Grace Paley.

This book is the closest thing to a bible I’ll ever have. I keep it at my desk, as if it were a reference text; I thumb through it for quotes, for inspiration, for comfort; I rely on it to calibrate my worldview; it remains my touchstone for good prose.

For many decades, Paley was a vocal feminist and pacifist. She organized pro-choice rallies, demonstrated against the Vietnam War and was once arrested for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner (‘No Nuclear War – No Nuclear Power – US and USSR’) on the White House lawn.

By her own account, social action was the central project of Paley’s life. When the Paris Review asked her why she had written so little in her lifetime (she published three slim volumes of stories as well as some collections of poetry and essays), she told them that ‘art is too long and life is too short.’ There were a lot of things to do besides writing.

But before she was an activist, Grace Paley was a wife and mother, spending her days in the small apartments and neighbourhood playgrounds of New York. And it was this life she chronicled when she began to write in the fifties. Her stories from this time are manifestly domestic: brief, sad, funny portraits of harassed women, neglected wives, exhausted mothers. One of her best-known pieces is about a woman returning a library book. Another one begins with a husband buying his wife a broom.

In Paley’s life and work, you can see a neat trajectory from art to activism, from the private to the public. Her stories showed that ‘everyday life, kitchen life, children life’ (as she herself puts it in the introduction to her collection) could be literature. She found this voice at precisely the right moment to ride feminism’s second wave – and then she turned from home toward politics.

There’s only one thing that complicates this satisfying story, and it’s that the brooms are better. As much as I admire Paley the political figure, the Paley I come back to time and again is Paley the writer. Not only that, it’s the one who wrote while still at home, trapped in her circumstances, conflicted and droll and resigned. Here’s a passage from the broom story, ‘An Interest in Life’:

Happiness isn’t so bad for a woman. She gets fatter, she gets older, she could lie down, nuzzling a regiment of men and little kids, she could just die of the pleasure.

And here’s one from ‘Wants’, in which the narrator meets her ex-husband in the street on her way to return a library book:

Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-
seven years, so I felt justified.
He said, What? What life? No life of mine.
I said O.K. I don’t argue when there’s real disagreement.

Neither of these can be mistaken for feminist rallying cries, but both have helped me know myself and understand the world in a way that a manifesto can’t. Life is short; art is long. ■

Also on The F Word Online:

Granta Audio, The F Word in Norwich: Maja Hrgović, Urvashi Butalia and A.S. Byatt reading for The F Word and Norwich Wriers’ Centre.

‘Poor women bear the brunt of the difficulties Haitian women face’: an interview with Edwidge Danticat.

‘The End of the Discussion’: Some tender last words from Patrick Ryan’s Aunt Sue.

Taiye Selasi made her fiction debut in The F Word, with ‘The Sex Lives of African Girls’. It has already gained attention in reviews: The Times called it a ‘standout piece of fiction’; Time Out wrote that the ‘prose glitters with beautiful, splintered poetry’. The acclaim is just another stamp of approval for Selasi, who has been championed by Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie and whose first novel, Ghana Must Go is one of next year’s most eagerly anticipated books. Selasi answered a few questions for Granta’s Yuka Igarashi about her life as a writer so far and about how she came to write this remarkable story.

YI: Your story takes places in a rich household in Accra. Even though many of the characters are leading comfortable lives, a sense of menace runs beneath the surface. I was scared for all the women, especially the young narrator. Did you mean to paint the sex lives of African girls as dangerous and doomed?

TS: It’s hard to say what I meant, but that’s certainly what I’ve done. To be honest, I was rather surprised to discover that I’d painted such a devastating portrait. It was only months and months after I’d finished editing – focusing narrowly on rhythm, image, pacing, form – that I noticed how dark the content was, how fundamentally damning the comment.

This piece is told from the perspective of a girl who is just starting to grasp the sexual dynamics at play among the adults around her. It’s interesting that you chose to inhabit her limited point of view. Was it hard to get this narrator’s voice right – to figure out what she does and doesn’t understand?

I suspect the second person helped a great deal. This ‘you’ voice appeared in my head from the beginning and guided me through the text, limiting my view of things to her view: I rarely looked where she wasn’t looking. In the first draft I’d included a passage alluding to the nature of Uncle’s work in Ghana’s oil extraction industry – but omitted it when it became clear that the narrator wouldn’t (couldn’t possibly) understand such politics. I’d slipped for a moment into an ‘I’ voice, an ‘I’ mind, and it showed.

During our launch events, you mentioned some of the incredible mentors you’ve had. Who are your models as a writer?

Oh, so many. I adore Penelope Lively, Alessandro Baricco, Roberto Bolaño, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy. But they’re less my models than my heroes; most of my mentors haven’t been novelists, at all: my high school creative writing teacher James Connolly, my stepfather Wilburn Williams, my dear friend the painter Francesco Clemente, my aunt and arts educator Renee C. Neblett.

I remember you saying that Toni Morrison told you that you must not think of your audience while you’re writing. Still, I was curious about who you see as your audience. Do you want to be read by Ghanaians? By women?

As one writer so beautifully put it, ‘For though to be read is not the motive which impels the author to write, once he has written his desire is to be read, and in order to achieve that, he must do his best to make what he writes readable.’ Like beggars, first-time novelists can't be choosers. We just aim to be readable. ■

To read ‘The Sex Lives of African Girls’, buy the issue here. Or subscribe to our podcast to hear a recording of our launch event with Taiye Selasi, Rachel Cusk and Sigrid Rausing. You can see Taiye reading from her story here.

photo by Nancy Crompton.

Also on The F Word Online:

'Accidents': a new poem by Sadaf Halai, and for one week only, read another of her exclusive poems free from the print edition.

Oranges are the only fruit: Ellah Allfrey looks at the literary prize where there are no boys allowed.

Old World female empowerment: Brazilian soap opera and Turkish folklore with Sevil Delin and her grandmother.

This evening at McNally Jackson Books in New York, our editor John Freeman will join two of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists to talk about their latest projects.

Karen Russell’s new novel is Swamplandia! It tells the story of a teenager named Ava Bigtree who has been left in charge of her family's alligator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. Kevin Brockmeier is most recently the author of The Illumination, a novel about a world where all wounds emit light.

In conjunction with the event, stories from Russell and Brockmeier are free to read from our archive. Click on the links for ‘Parakeets’ by Kevin Brockmeier and ‘The Barn at the End of Our Term’ by Karen Russell.

Below we've also reposted a Q & A conducted earlier this year between Kevin Brockmeier and Granta's Yuka Igarashi.

Enjoy!

Interview with Kevin Brockmeier

YI: The Illumination contains an extraordinary premise: suddenly, all human pain begins to manifest itself as light. What led you to create this world where people’s wounds, cancers, hangovers, and self-mutilations are illuminated?

KB: I was thinking about the various forms of pain people are forced to endure, wondering, really, what could all that suffering possibly be good for, and found myself conducting a thought experiment: What if our pain was what made us beautiful to God? What if our pain was the most beautiful thing about us? I had an image of someone literally glowing with his injuries. This simple equation, of pain with light, gave birth to the book.

It’s interesting that, when the Illumination starts happening, it doesn’t upend the social order or radically change people’s behaviours. Rather than a catalyst, it acts as a kind of highlighter, calling attention back to the world as we know it. Is this how you see fantastical elements working in your stories?

I’m thinking of a line from G. K. Chesterton’s The Poet and the Lunatics, where he says of St Peter that, dying upside down, he ‘saw the landscape as it really is: with the stars like flowers, and the clouds like hills, and all men hanging on the mercy of God’. For an agnostic, I write about God an awful lot, both here and in this book, don’t I? Anyway, my instinct is that the great big real world of sensations and objects and other people’s minds is already deeply strange, but sometimes it takes a change of perspective for us to see it clearly. So yes, I often turn to the fantastic to bring that clarity to my perception, but also because it has provided me with a number of metaphors that seemed potent and beautiful to me, and because the imagery of fantasy allows me to write certain kinds of sentences I enjoy writing, and finally, frankly, because I grew up reading a lot of science fiction and there are certain forms of oddity that simply excite my imagination.

Your novels often incorporate many different points of view. The Brief History of the Dead includes the perspective of dead people, and one impressive part of The Truth About Celia briefly inhabits the consciousness of a squirrel. How do you make decisions about point of view in your writing?

I can tell you that my point-of-view decisions always come early, as they must if a story is going to abide by its own strictures, and that I enjoy venturing beyond the usual range of possibilities. Occasionally, in fact, some unusual point-of-view strategy is what permits me to tell a story in the first place. I have a story called ‘Andrea Is Changing Her Name’, which is formally very strange but edges closer to autobiography than anything else I've written. I had already made several attempts to write the story before I stumbled upon its peculiar point-of-view approach – a first-person narrative, but one that freely (and almost exclusively) adopts the perspective of a third-person character. It was this method that gave me the licence I needed to tell a story so intimate to me, one in which I tried to reconstruct a certain period of my life and inhabit the mind of someone I loved.

I couldn’t help but notice that squirrels make a few appearances in this novel as well. What is it about them?

Two things I can tell you: (1) My college campus was an oasis of trees, and the many, many squirrels who lived there knew they were safe from harm and so became quite bold about racing across footpaths, pawing through the garbage, and inquiring silently but unmistakably at people for food. And (2) in high school, when I was about eighteen, I stood in my carport once during a bright mid-afternoon rainstorm while a squirrel took refuge in the other corner, the two of us gazing at each other from inside our odd foreign intelligences – a small experience, but one I knew, even back then, I would be unlikely to forget. And funny thing about the squirrel in The Truth About Celia: I remember when I was writing that section of the book thinking, Boy, Jenny (Minton: my editor at the time) is going to hate this manoeuvre, and boy, did she. She tried hard to convince me to excise him from the book.

In an interview about The Truth About Celia, you say that each chapter of that book relies on ‘a different set of ground rules’. This seemed true of The Illumination as well – not to give too much away, there’s one striking ‘rule-bound’ part in the book. Do limitations make it easier or harder to write?

I doubt I’ve ever written a story that didn’t construct and attempt to abide by (and occasionally very deliberately to violate) its own set of rules. Sometimes these rules are ...often enough I feel as if I've built a wall, walked to the end of it, and discovered that it's actually a staircase.meant to be apparent, as in the section you mention, sometimes concealed. You’re right that there’s a pattern-making element to many of my stories, a mathematical element, but I hope that this deepens my resources rather than depletes them and that the limitations I impose on myself force me to invent new kinds of freedom. Sometimes, I won’t deny, I begin to find some self-imposed constraint or another exasperating, but often enough I feel as if I’ve built a wall, walked to the end of it, and discovered that it’s actually a staircase.

The Illumination is held together by writing. Central to the plot is a journal of love notes that passes between characters; one of the characters is a writer while another sells books. Can you discuss your use of writing and writers within your narratives?

I worry that it’s simply an unfortunate reflex sympathy of mine. In the case of this novel, I wanted the journal to lend a layer of love and compassion, of sentiment, to a book that otherwise narrows its gaze so often on pain and disability. Since each of the other characters is enduring an injury, a wound, of one sort or another, and each of them feels that the diary speaks to and soothes their pain, I wanted to find several different ways of allowing them to employ the book in their lives. Thus, the two characters you comment upon: a bookseller who can’t quite bring himself to treat the journal as merchandise and a writer who uses it as raw material for a strange sort of escape story. Sending the writer out into the world also allowed me to visit a handful of (real) bookstores, to seed the story with a little fable I wanted to create, and to write more forthrightly than I have in the past about a particular physical problem I’ve experienced, since of all the many forms of pain the book investigates, it’s hers that I know most intimately.

Can you tell us what you’re working on now?

I can tell you that I’m working on another book – a narrative – but I’m afraid to say anything more about it lest the threads come loose.

And what are you reading?

In my immediate reading future are A Splendid Conspiracy by Albert Cossery, Edinburgh by Alexander Chee, Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey, and a new graphic novel adaptation of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. Recently I’ve admired Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Patrick Somerville’s The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, and Jules Renard’s Nature Stories. The best book I’ve read in the past year, though, is the very short novel The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra, who writes with such tenderness and insight that his books make most other, longer, novels seem like great lumbering immensities that merely crush the ground they cover rather than observing it.

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Last week, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. This week, she was longlisted for the Orange Prize. These were part of a wave of critical and popular acclaim for Egan’s book, which was a bestseller and topped ‘must-read’ lists in the US last year.

The excitement about Goon Squad – a chapter of which was excerpted in Granta 110: Sex – has to do with the way it manages to be an ambitious social novel, a structural experiment and a page-turner all at once. Egan answered some questions for Granta’s Yuka Igarashi about this exceptional book.

YI: Congratulations on your National Book Critics Circle Award. NBCC called A Visit from the Goon Squad ‘at once experimental in form and crystal clear in the overlapping stories it delivers’. Do you consider your book experimental?

JE: I didn’t think of it that way as I was working on it; I’m someone who doesn’t necessarily lunge to read ‘experimental’ work, because for me that word tends to connote abstraction, even a kind of severity, rather than a reading experience that might be fun. At the same time, I was aware while working on Goon Squad that it wasn’t quite like anything I had read before, and that was one of the things that excited me. I was telling a complicated, polyphonic story, and the best way to tell it turned out to be this oddly structured book. But it wasn’t an experiment so much as a response to the need to find a way to embody the oddly shaped story I wanted to tell.

The book is narrated by a wide array of interrelated characters over several decades. I’m curious about how you conceived of and created this structure. Did you see the whole novel at once? Did you write the chapters in order?

‘I was telling a complicated, polyphonic story, and the best way to tell it turned out to be this oddly structured book.’ Well, I didn’t even see it as a novel, exactly, but more as a series of lateral ‘moves’ in which a peripheral character that has hopefully provoked curiosity at an earlier point is revealed to have a complex, even tumultuous inner life. It evolved pretty organically, and I didn't have a clear sense of the whole until close to the end. For a long time I imagined that the book would simply move backwards, because the early chapters were unfolding that way, but the plan was complicated, first, by the emergence of chapters that took place in the future, and, second, by my horrified discovery, when I read the book through in a backwards order, that the result was lumbering and flat. It was at that point that I realized I needed to let go of linear chronology entirely, and that backwards was still linear. The order of the chapters was one of the last things to fall into place, and really hinged on my asking myself, ‘Having just read X, what will the reader be most surprised – yet satisfied – to encounter next?’

The ‘goon’ in your title is time. One character says to another: ‘Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?’ In your book at least, the answer is yes – time beats all of your characters to a pulp. Do you think time ever makes people wiser or better?

I think it makes people wiser and better in this very book. I’d say that Bennie and Sasha – the two main characters – both emerge wiser and (certainly in Sasha’s case, since she seems not to be stealing from people anymore) in better shape than at many other times when we’ve encountered them. Scotty lands on top, despite his quasi-derelict years, and even Bosco, who first utters the ‘goon’ line as part of his explanation for why he wants to commit suicide publicly, winds up recovering from cancer and owning a dairy farm. So the prognosis isn’t all bad! In real life, I think the passage of time gives us the revelation of perspective: understanding that the present is fleeting and not eternal. That is big wisdom of a sort.

One chapter in your book is written as a series of PowerPoint slides. It’s narrated by Alison, a girl growing up sometime in the near future. Are all teenage diaries going to be written on PowerPoint soon?

Let’s hope not! For me, having a kid write in PowerPoint was a way of getting around the corporate feel of the programme, which I’d struggled with when I tried to use it to write a different chapter. The truth is that writing in PowerPoint is really hard, so my guess is that kids will hew to more conventional forms of recording their thoughts. It’s just plain easier – and faster – to do it that way.

This book is filled with music – not just musicians, but fans, producers, rock critics, and publicists. What has your relationship with music been like?

Less intense than people tend to assume from Goon Squad. I’m really not a music-head, but I certainly defined myself musically when I was a teenager (I especially loved The Who, the Sex Pistols and Iggy Pop). Since then, my relationship with music has been more peripheral; I don’t generally listen to it as I work (except on this book), I don’t go to concerts. I think music is actually most important to me when I go running. I wear an iPod, and the combination of running and music seems to loosen up a lot of ideas in my head, and I find that I have valuable insights into my fiction at those times. I’ve also had a longstanding curiosity about the music industry, which I wasn’t able to satisfy as a journalist because there were other excellent journalists who had that area covered. So I guess by writing Goon Squad, I finally gave myself a reason to do some research into the music industry! ■

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad was released in the UK by Corsair this week.

Home page photo by Pieter M. Van Hattem/Vistalux
Top photo by Marion Ettlinger

‘The Gold Cure’, a chapter from Jennifer Egan’s novel, was published in Granta 110: Sex. To read it, you can buy the issue here.

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Yuka Igarashi reports on author Elif Batuman’s recent lecture at the British Museum, and asks, at what price does a writer’s material come?

Last Monday, Elif Batuman took to the stage at the British Museum lecture theatre to explain what Don Quixote had to do with accounting.

The title of her talk, for the London Review of Books Winter Lectures series, sounds like a parody of scholarly obscurity: ‘Cervantes, Balzac and double-entry bookkeeping’. But readers familiar with Batuman’s book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them knew to expect something much more entertaining—and wide-ranging—than an academic paper. The Possessed is about Batuman's years studying for a PhD in comparative literature at Stanford. It’s been called a mix of memoir and criticism, and she herself has called her writing ‘literary fluff journalism’. Even taken together, though, these categories don’t nearly describe the book.

All academics are analogy-makers, but Batuman is a fearless, boundary-ignoring one. In a chapter on Isaac Babel, she compares the 'military embarrassment of the botched 1920 Russo-Polish campaign' to the 'culinary embarrassment' of a cake she bakes; in her study of Dostoyevsky, she shows what the literary theory of mimetic desire has to do with an affair she has with a Croatian philosophy major. She uses a Tolstoy play as evidence in a Sherlock-Holmes-inspired mystery about the writer's death; she draws a parallel between her summer studying poetry in Uzbekistan and an excised chapter of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

Although her presentation didn’t have the same idiosyncratically autobiographical focus, Batuman’s talent for analogies was still on display at the British Museum. The novel is like the account book (both forms of recording life arose around the same time, as paper became more readily available); the obsessive need to account for one's financial dealings is like the obsessive need for spiritual confession; Levin is to Anna Karenina what Leporello is to the opera Don Giovanni.

Batuman’s hyperlinking brain is engaging, even infectious: I couldn't help making my own connections. What tied this lecture to The Possessed—and in fact to everything I had read by Batuman—was her concern with how writers should live. She's interested in the connection (there it is again) between a writer's life and what they put of it in their writing.

In her lecture, she set up writing and life as a 'credit/debit' relationship: writing takes time, but you need to take time away from writing to have something to write about. So how do writers negotiate their time-accounts? To her, Don Quixote is about a guy who accrues a ‘credit’ of experiences in order to write a book like the chivalric romances he loves: ‘debit’. Proust's In Search of Lost Time is about a guy who has no real material (credit) and manages to write a seven-volume novel anyway (debit).

Where does material come from? Where should it come from? These questions become especially compelling when Batuman relates it to her ideas about ‘narratives of victimhood’.

Batuman didn’t discuss this topic in her lecture, but she touches on it in her book, and it makes up a large chunk of an essay she wrote for The London Review of Books last September. The essay, ‘Get a Real Degree’, is notorious as a critique of American Creative Writing programmes. She accuses MFA-educated writers of not reading enough and of being overly concerned with technique; she also argues that people are taught to believe that they can be writers ‘only in the presence of real or invented sociopolitical grievances’. Instead of universal literary value, she writes, literature is measured by ‘a primary standard of persecutedness, euphemised as “difference”’. Only victims—only the alienated—have stories to tell.

‘If you spend any time living in a ghetto or fighting in a war, might this be objectively the most narrative-worthy period of your life?’The essay was hotly contested, but even those who rushed to defend MFAs (here’s Adam Wilson in BlackBook, and Lincoln Michel in The Faster Times) agreed that she had a point about the cult of victimhood. I think her complaint is made much stronger by the fact that she takes writers' need for material so seriously. She quite cruelly makes fun of one contemporary novelist for building a career out of nine months in Vietnam, and is ‘deeply depressed’ that another one benefits from our ‘wound culture’— but then she turns around and asks: ‘If you spend any time living in a ghetto or fighting in a war, might this be objectively the most narrative-worthy period of your life?’

We want to hear stories we haven’t heard before. We want to hear new ways of telling them, of course, but we want the stories to be new, too. So maybe it’s inevitable that stories from foreign places, stories from previously unheard voices, are more exciting to read.

Listening to Batuman, I wondered if our issue on alienation risked privileging ‘narratives of victimhood’. Like poor Don Quixote, do all writers need to force themselves through ordeals to have something to write about?

Perhaps it’s a matter of expanding our definition of ordeal. Batuman reminds us that there’s more than one way to earn ‘credit’. She’s her own best example: she’s a Turkish-American woman from New Jersey who devoted her twenties to studying Russian novels, and who got incredibly compelling stories out of the experience. (Grad school, after all, is its own kind of ordeal.) It’s a good thing for writers to keep in mind, as they clutch their account books and venture through life, wondering how to balance their time. ■

Elif Batuman’s The Possessed will be published by Granta Books in the UK this April. It is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA.

cover image by Mikhail Lemkhin.

Also on the Granta blog... George Orwell is a guest blogger. Read his diary from his trip to research The Road to Wigan Pier.

Granta has published the best of Young British, American, and Spanish Language novelists. Adam Thirwell discusses lists, and why we make them.