Johnny West, a writer specializing in the Middle East, reports from Lebanon on the ripple effects of the current uprising in Syria. He describes the refugee crisis at the country’s borders, and gives a glimpse into the sectarian dynamic as the death toll from the protests continues to rise.

On one side of the conflict are the Alawis, the minority sect from which Syria’s ruling Assad family comes; on the other are the majority Sunni Muslims. West finds himself in the middle of clashes between the two groups in Tripoli, in northern Lebanon.

I was looking for Syrian kind of trouble but couldn’t get into Syria. Due in Beirut for a work trip, I had arrived a few days early to head up to Wadi Khaled in Lebanon’s far north. A small lick of land up there juts into Syria just south of Krak des Chevaliers and thousands of people from towns on the Syrian side of the border had fetched up in the preceding weeks before, fleeing house to house searches and outright invasion by their own army. Just the intense awareness of being in the line of sight of an invisible sniper’s rifle, on open ground. I’d met refugee families camped on open farmland, others who still commuted to Lebanon freely from the city of Homs as business owners or day labourers, and the many extended families whose members straddled the border. I’d walked across a freshly cropped field of hay to the edge of the Kabir River and looked twenty yards across the knee-deep muddy water to Syria, its reed beds, market garden hothouses and dirty, small-town concrete buildings indistinguishable from the Lebanese side on which I stood. No barbed wire or walls, no flags even. Just the intense awareness of being in the line of sight of an invisible sniper’s rifle, on open ground.

Evidence of the crisis was everywhere. I forgot the rules of journalism and found myself stuffing a paltry wad of Lebanese lira into the hand of a reluctant elder, only to curse myself and the young man who trailed me back to my car looking for his own handout. But the humanitarian crisis itself was generic, much as it must have been in Kosovo or Bosnia, Libya or Iraq. As mobile, affluent, privileged outsiders, our questions to these refugees who had so recently had to flee their homes were just points along the single vector of suffering – how much have you suffered, are you suffering, will you suffer, and in what ways? That accumulated suffering, weighed and conveyed, becomes a kind of combustible fuel that feeds the news cycle.

But the political talk was more striking. The Syrians streaming across the border were Sunni Muslims from the heartlands – Homs, Hama, Tal Kalakh – and their hearts were full of hatred for the Alawi sect from which the Assads come. Not just the Assads themselves, or the regime which they head, but all two and a half million of the Alawis in Syria.

‘Why does the Alawi behave like an animal?’ said Abu Mohammed, sitting in his workshop he has run in a Lebanese village just over the border for the last ten years.‘Because he has no religious deterrent. You and I believe in Heaven and Hell – we are afraid of God. But for the Alawi this life is all there is. We are less than animals to him.’

‘They are not Muslims,’ said Abu Ahmad. ‘They say they are Shia but they’re not.’

These people had plenty of reason to be angry. I’m not sure I’d choose my words carefully either if I was sleeping in a makeshift tent, uncertain of when or if I could ever go home, and worried sick about my son, made to serve in the same army that shot at me and now endangered to some degree, by my marked absence. But the ontological nature of the rhetoric was unsettling. Not what the Alawis do, but what they are. Were the Assads right when they predicted civil war without them? I didn’t want to believe it.

I decided to stop in on Tripoli, Lebanon’s second city, on my way back to Beirut. Most of the country’s 150,000 Alawis live there, side by bristling side with a fundamentalist Sunni Muslim community on the hill overlooking the port. Even if I didn’t have a chance to see the dynamic at work in Syria, it was on full display by proxy in Lebanon.

When I called Rifaat Eid, the man who can get 1,500 armed Alawis onto the streets, he told me to drop by in the evening. How will I find you, I asked. Just head to the Jabel Mohsen district and ask, he said. He was right. Ten seconds after I stopped at a garage to ask, a teenager zipped up on a moped. Follow me, he said, and weaved through the traffic up the hill, then off the road and straight through two checkpoints that stirred into life at our approach, as if his moped and my economy hire car was its own motorcade. A minute later I was parking in front of a house, and the teenager had handed me over to a bodybuilder called Ali – tank top, shaved head, tattoos, modest bling, walkie-talkie and a handgun. As he waddled ahead of me into the house there was a burst of automatic some way off. Not a disagreement I hope, I said, concentrating on an even tone. No, no, said Ali the Muscle, laughing. Celebration. After a four-month impasse, the new Lebanese government had been announced earlier that day and one more minister than expected had been allocated to Tripoli, so the boys – not his boys or their boys but ‘the boys’ in general – were out whooping it up, he explained.

Ali walked me into Rifaat’s office and disappeared. And then Rifaat was straight into me.

‘Look at that collective grave,’ he said, flicking up the volume on a flat screen TV hung against the wall, a pro-regime channel showing concerned Syrian officials talking about the massacre by armed gangs. ‘Isn’t it awful? Why don’t you report on what these criminals are doing?’

It took us two minutes to reach affable stalemate on the relativity of sources. Who was to say that al-Jadeed TV, which he watched, is the one lying and al-Jazeera or the BBC are telling the truth? Surely you can’t believe the regime, I said. You journalists, he replied.

He sat forward, hands woven together on the desk in front of him. He was in his early thirties, with close-cropped hair and a bull neck, wearing a button-down shirt and slacks. Although he told me his wife and children were US citizens and that he himself had a green card and travelled there every summer, Rifaat spoke almost no English.

Behind him was a trophy bookcase stacked with a multi-volume series of the works and collected thoughts of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad and Moussa Sadr, the charismatic preacher whom many credit with having helped Lebanon’s dispossessed Shia community find their voice back in the 70s. All of them displaying a large portrait of their heroes spread across the spine of the entire series. Books to be admired rather than read. In English, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Children’s Britannica and Patrick Seale’s biography Asad of Syria. On the walls were big glossy photos of the Assads father and son, and Rifaat’s own father Ali Eid, who had mobilized Lebanon’s Alawites in the 1970s.

‘Have you read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?’ he asked me. ‘It’s very good, I’ll find you a copy.’ He started to rummage around in his drawers, muttering something about how, a century ago, it had had the foresight to predict war in underground tunnels. I couldn’t see what was prophetic about that and in fact was more concerned about how to get out of receiving a copy. Where I come from, it’s a book that defiles you.

As we engaged in more back-and-forth about the Western conspiracy to destroy Syria, a coherent discours provocateur emerged. Sure, there’s some corruption in Syria and even, yes, some poverty, he said. But at least you don’t see people rummaging around in rubbish bins, like you do blacks in America, and if there are any issues to sort out, the Assads are just the guys to do it. It wasn’t his riff, of course. This is Baath Party classic.

The stakes were high in Tripoli. The Alawis on Jabel Mohsen and the salafists, or Sunni Muslim fundamentalists, next door in Bab al-Tabbaneh, were in perpetual standoff. In 2008 a firefight had led to several deaths and gang fighting was on-going. Eyes followed you wherever you went in that part of town.Eyes followed you wherever you went in that part of town. My status as a clueless foreigner gave me some minimal protection but an unidentified Arab wouldn’t last five minutes on those streets. Poster iconography deftly defined the boundaries between the two neighbourhoods, Jabel Mohsen adorned with fifteen-foot posters of Bashar al-Assad, one in a handshake with Rifaat, while black flags with the Muslim shahada, the main profession of faith, marked the entrance to the Sunni neighbourhoods along with, here and there, posters of Turkey’s Prime Minister Reccep Tayyip Erdogan.

‘They would kill us in our beds if they could,’ Rifaat said. ‘Two weeks ago the sermon at Friday prayers told them to kill our girls and boys when they get the chance. I heard it myself,’ he said.

Ali the Muscle poked his head round the door twice asking for instructions about this and that. Rifaat also took a couple of phone calls, one of which I guessed was with someone fairly senior in the political class in Beirut. ‘Talk to Walid,’ he said. (Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Druze sect and a veteran player of the Lebanese political game.) ‘Walid knows how to do this.’

The only chink in Rifaat’s armour appeared when, in response to yet another riff on the Western plot against Syria’s noble Resistance – the Assads’ raison d’etre for forty years being their staunch defiance of Zionist aggression – I expostulated: What Resistance is that? What land has it liberated and how many Syrians have fallen martyr to the cause? It’s a common refrain of the Syrian opposition. When the tanks entered Homs, protesters ran out into the streets pointing back behind them – ‘The Golan’s that way!’ But Rifaat didn’t expect it from a Westerner and did a double take. You’re in favour of bloodshed, he asked. I’m in favour of straight speaking, I replied.

Rifaat shifted forward across the desk.

‘Look, you need to understand something. We Alawis were nothing in Lebanon until the Syrians came in 1977,’ he said, referring to the entry of the Syrian army, under the command of Bashar’s father Hafez, at the start of the Lebanese civil war. ‘My father went to America in 1960. He saw Martin Luther King and Malcolm X speak and he got a degree in chemistry. Then he did another degree at the American University in Beirut. Look, there’s his certificate on the wall. And when he’d finished, the only job he could get was as a garbage man or customs clerk. They just wanted us to clean their shoes.

‘He came back home to Tripoli and spent two years thinking about politics. Then he founded the Arab Youth Movement. Then the war started and the Syrians came and they showed us how to fight, how to mobilize. And we learned to defend ourselves. Even when they withdrew, we got two seats in the Lebanese parliament.

‘So I am with them, right or wrong. They are my guys and I am theirs. Right or wrong. Because they are our only hope,’ he said.

I could understand that kind of loyalty, I said. But wasn’t that a personal position rather than a political one? As a leader, didn’t he bear a responsibility to his community to at least try and leave other paths open a fraction? Otherwise, where would they be if the Assads did go down in Syria?

Rifaat just shrugged. Right or wrong, there is no other hope, he kept repeating. A thunderstorm had broken outside and rain crashed against the roof and windows. Rifaat was courteous as he walked me to the door. Ali the Muscle saw me to my car and signalled to his guys to open the checkpoints.

The next day, in Tripoli, Lebanon, I ran into some young bloods by the clock tower in the centre of town. I had foolishly believed the parking meters to be decorative and found my car had been clamped while I was having breakfast. At three dollars, the fine was more of an experience than a deterrent and I called the telephone number printed on the ticket and waited for someone to come release my car. Meanwhile I drank coffee at a nearby street stand.

A young man called Amr was sitting near me on a plastic chair, getting a shoulder rub from his friend. When he learned who I was and where I had been, he spat on the ground.

‘The Alawi are dogs. In fact, that’s an insult to dogs,’ he said. ‘We are going to deal with them. Soon.’

His massaging friend told me he’d just come home from a long stretch living in Sydney. I wondered whether he suffered any cognitive dissonance as he looked out on the street with its chaotic bustle, bullet-pocked buildings and the tide of plastic bags swept by the early morning breeze across the square like urban tumbleweed. Amr was clearly a boss of some kind. He ‘worked’ in the shop we were outside and people came up and asked his opinion on various things, which he issued curtly. As we chatted, a big man, like all of them in his mid-twenties, solidly built and wearing a barrio string vest turned up. They are nothing. Worse than animals. We will cut their throats like sheep, he said.Amr introduced me and his friend stood there, all six foot four of him, and blew me a kiss, po-faced. I’ve always appreciated the potential to demonstrate virility through camp. My grandfather Billy, a decorated career soldier and prize-winning boxer with more than a touch of Errol Flynn to him, had loved cross-dressing for vaudeville. But here it took on a sinister air, a promise, somehow, of blood. What are we going to do to the Alawi dogs? Amr asked. Big Man drew his finger across his throat. The parking attendant turned up on a moped and Amr made to intimidate him into not collecting the fine. I insisted on paying up. The guy, after all, was just doing his job.

As I got into the car, Amr drew me aside, conspiratorially, which was odd since we were already alone. They are nothing. Worse than animals. We will cut their throats like sheep, he said.

I headed on to Beirut where I was giving a workshop on Iraqi oil for the United Nations. We stayed in one of the country clubs above Jounieh, the Maronite heartland, and popped down to Beirut at night along a six-lane, five-mile strip mall with huge posters advertising cosmetic surgery and foreign currency futures. Tripoli was only an hour north but seemed a lot further away.

Three days later, the radio and TV channels were full of news of fighting in Tripoli. After Friday night prayers, there were two demonstrations against the Syrian regime. One, which ran from the main Hamza Mosque to the Noor Square in the centre of town, was led by the League of Muslim Students and Syrian students at the Lebanese University. I imagine this as proper civil dissent, with thought-out slogans carefully inscribed on banners and orderly marching. The other demonstration was from Bab al-Tabbaneh, the stronghold of the salafists, led by men with the dress code of militant orthodox Sunnis, perfumed beards, immaculate dishdashas and skullcaps.

This is the demonstration that led to the violence. They tore up pictures of Omar Karami, a respected national figure from Tripoli whose son had just joined the new government. On Jabal Mohsen a few streets away, young men came onto the street and hoisted a huge picture of Bashar al-Assad. The two rival groups of protesters moved closer to each other, chanting. Then a sound grenade was set off amid a throng of men on the street and, according to eyewitnesses, all hell broke loose. Everyone with a weapon on the street started to fire, wildly, randomly. I read the report in the newspaper al-Hayat that an off-duty soldier in the Lebanese army had been killed standing outside his house. Mundhir al-Rifai was shot in the head sitting in his car on his way home from work. Another man called Mohammed Shaqra was killed, as was a teenager late in the afternoon. Reading this, I remembered hearing that someone once calculated that during Lebanon’s civil war, a million rounds were fired for every person killed. I don’t know how you’d know that but the scars on its cities a generation later would suggest something of the kind.

In paragraph seven of the al-Hayat story, the dry recount of the ‘score’ snapped into life. ‘Security sources said that the security chief of the Arab Democratic Party Ali Faris was hit, as was Khodr Faris of Bab al-Tabbaneh, by a serious wound, and that the first man died in hospital.’

Ali the Muscle was dead.

The new prime minister of Lebanon, Najib Mikati, also from Tripoli, was visiting the city that day and took the fighting as a personal insult. In a press conference held at his house, while sporadic bursts of automatic still punctured the calm of the evening, al-Hayat reported, he said it was clearly a message, adding that he didn’t know where the message was from and what, in fact, this message was. ‘We will investigate. We don’t accuse anyone,’ he said. Opposition politician Samir al-Jisr immediately accused Mikati of accusing, indirectly, the opposition of being behind the violence.

Mikati and the other politicians might be right, this could be some message. Someone in Damascus or Riyadh, or Ealing come to that, might have placed a call and said this is the day, show them what’s what. That’s the way proxy struggles work. Or they could just be acting on default. It’s the Levant. Things can’t just be what they are; they have to mean something else, something hidden. Lebanese politics is an endless game where assassinations join ministerial appointments and shuttle diplomacy as another way you keep count.

There’s no way of knowing. But I was struck by a paradox.

It’s a truism that sectarianism dehumanizes the Other. The talk I’d heard couldn’t come free. Blood was always going to flow. The Alawis/Sunnis are dogs, or animals or, worse, fanatics or unbelievers. But by the mere chance of meeting the protagonists three days before they took their fight to the street, I also realized how sectarianism dehumanizes its perpetrators too.

I thought of Rifaat Eid, probably bunkered down, his young crew frightened by Ali’s death, in over their heads, too proud to admit it, and jumpy as hell with too much ordnance. I wondered whether Amr and Big Man had been on the other side, setting off some rounds, looking for targets to pick off. And Ali the Muscle clean gone, his mother and father still alive most likely – he was no more than thirty-five – and forced to bury their murdered boy.

All of them have brothers or cousins who aren’t in the game the way they are. They might not voice dissent, but they vote with their feet, moving to to Virginia or Sydney or even just to Beirut and a decent job. Which means that every single man who has stayed, and is locked in that conflict, has come there through various complicated life choices over a period of time. And yet all individuality is collapsed by the dog-eat-dog language of ‘us and them’ into a choice between one of two separate, irreconcilable identities, locked in conflict with the other. ■

Also on Granta Online:

Granta Audio: Jamil Ahmad in conversation with Ellah Allfrey.

My Caine Prize Year: The 2010 recipient Olufemi Terry reflects on his prizewinning year.

Saving Grace: Yuka Igarashi considers Grace Paley’s short stories and the relationship between art and activism.

Since Granta’s inaugural list of the Best of Young British Novelists in 1983 – which featured stories by Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Pat Barker and Graham Swift – the Best of Young issues have been some of the magazine’s most influential. We published two more Best of Young British Novelists lists, in 1993 and 2003 – with the next due out in 2013 – and lists for American novelists in 1996 and 2007. The titles have become milestones on the literary landscape, predicting talent as much as spotting it.

Now, Granta em Português has announced the publication of The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists, to be published in Portuguese in July 2012 and in English, Autumn 2012. Granta editor John Freeman spoke to Granta em Português editor Marcelo Ferronio about choosing the writers, Brazilian inspiration and the judges of the competition.

JF: Do you think there is a generation of writers under forty doing something new in Brazil, and if so, how would you characterize them?

MF: I think there’s a vibrant new generation of writers, trying to do something very different with Brazilian literature. They’re still drawing heavily from the Brazilian literary tradition, but at the same time they’re absorbing a series of references from foreign authors and popular culture. So, what you have are texts that are less experimental, with less of a focus on Brazilian cultural issues, but with truly original ideas.

How do young writers in Brazil differ from the generations before them? Which writers seem to loom large for them as models or inspirations?

There are a few Brazilian classics that are still crucial to new Brazilian authors, such as Clarice Lispector and Guimarães Rosa. Machado de Assis – maybe our greatest novelist – is still mentioned by many of them. The modernists in Brazil (such as Oswald de Andrade) left a heritage that’s still very important for a number of authors in Rio and São Paulo. But, at the same time that Brazilian authors are deeply influential, there’s been a change in the way we assimilate foreign fiction.there's been a change in the way we assimilate foreign fiction. Bolaño is definitely one of the strongest references in terms of foreign authors, as well as Argentinian literature in general (from Sarmiento to, say, Ricardo Piglia). We’re probably assimilating more and more of this wonderful literature that’s being, and has been, written by our Latin American peers. I don’t think it had the same impact a few years ago – Brazil was too closed to those influences – but now I feel there’s an exchange of ideas and styles among the South American countries.

Brazil, like America, and many other countries for that matter, has a huge disparity between the rich and poor. Do you expect to find someone who is writing, as they say, from the ground up?

Well, I think we could have someone like that, and I hope we have. In the past few years I’ve read interesting new voices from the poorer communities, really different from the standard Brazilian literature.

You published the Best of Young American Novelists in Portuguese in Brazil. How were they received, and what stood out in that generation for readers or critics?

It was our first edition of Granta in Portuguese, actually, and it was very well received. A few authors on this list were already relatively well known in Brazil (Jonathan Safran Foer, for instance), and others had their books published before our edition, so it might have helped that.

Tell me a little bit about the judges for Best Young Brazilian.

We have one journalist and literary critic, Manuel da Costa Pinto, who’s also the coordinator of Flip (The Paraty Literary Festival). He’s written a book on the new generation of Brazilian writers, so it was wonderful that he’s decided to join us. Italo Moriconi is a poet and scholar who has edited an important collection on the best Brazilian short stories of the twentieth century and is the curator of the next Brazilian Book Biennial. Samuel Titan is a translator and literature professor and Cristovão Tezza is one of the most important Brazilian writers today. We also have Benjamin Moser, author of a biography on Clarice Lispector, and two editors of Granta in Portuguese, Isa Pessóa and me. So I think we have a great team, with heterogeneous opinions on Brazilian literature, I’m looking forward to discussing it and creating an interesting list of young and promising authors.

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 Writers’ 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.

We've heard a lot from the women for this online edition of Granta 115: The F-Word, with feminist bibles, feminist sacrifices, feminist revolutions and feminism in pictures.

Now, we're briefly crossing the gender divide to bring you Toby Litt’s step-by-step guide to how to be a proper, young gentleman. And if you think Toby's left anything off the list, tweet us @grantamag and tell us what you think makes a proper #gent. Top hats at your indiscretion.

A gentleman should arrive at his destination, after however arduous a journey, quite as if he had just taken a turn around the rose garden.

A gentleman should never acknowledge a mere fact.

A gentleman should behave no differently in a prison than in a palace – to be affected by place shows lack of character.

A gentleman should never confuse superiority with nobility.

A gentleman – English – should reassure foreigners of his bona fides by appearing to be nothing more than a parody of an English gentleman; this is particularly important with the French.

A gentleman should never be heard to say anything other gentlemen have not said before.

A gentleman should greet physical agony much as if he were greeting his old Latin master.

A gentleman should never pass comment on his latest meal, no more than he would upon his latest evacuation.

A gentleman should smoke, if not for pleasure then to set his companions at their ease.

A gentleman should never condescend to condescend.

A gentleman should, when he is in the country, kill something larger than a squirrel at least once a day.

A gentleman should never evince surprise, except whilst opening Christmas presents from his children.

A gentleman should seem to lack nothing.

A gentleman should never appear utterly entranced by anything other than a horse or his fiancee on the day their engagement is announced.

A gentleman should greet with genuine warmth only the following persons – his sister’s daughters, his maternal aunts and his mortal enemies.

A gentleman should never be seen to handle money, except in a brothel or a casino.

A gentleman should have as deep a familiarity with the great religious texts of the world as is commensurable with not having read them.

A gentleman should never keep a diary – to pay attention to one’s own affairs suggests one may wish to profit thereby.

A gentleman should take domestic politics slightly less seriously than backgammon.

A gentleman should never go beneath ground-level except when, once a year, inspecting the wine cellars.

A gentleman should be as fluent in the little language of love as in le passé composé.

A gentleman should never run, except towards certain death.

A gentleman should walk as if he were being carried and – if ever the circumstance arises – be carried as if he were walking.

A gentleman should quote no one but his nanny, and then only back at her, with fondness, just before she dies.

A gentleman himself should die with an air of mild curiosity.

A gentleman, having once departed, should never return. ■

Photo by Albert Bridge

Also on The F Word Online:

Elizabeth Bishop and Sacrificial Feminism: a look at women-only poetry anthologies.

‘The Old Fuel’: A new poem by Emily Berry, and an interview with her.

‘Your world doesn’t exist anymore’: Four women and one revolution in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

Tonight the 2011 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize was awarded to Santiago Roncagliolo for his third novel, Red April. Roncagliolo was one of Granta’s Best of Young Spanish Novelists. He is the youngest author and the first Peruvian to win.

Roncagliolo remarked that the award closed a wonderful ‘British season’ for him and his book. ‘During the last twelve months I’ve been to the UK many times to talk at festivals, libraries, bookshops and universities and I am sure that the support of all the people I met during those visits, including my publishers, my agents and my great translator, has been instrumental in my receiving of the Prize.’

The writer shares the honour with his translator, Edith Grossman. Grossman also translated ‘Stars and Stripes’, the story featured in Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists.

To celebrate the work of Santiago Roncagliolo and Edith Grossman, we offer an online special: ‘Stars and Stripes’ is free to read on our Issue 113 page. (Click here to go to the story directly.) Below, we repost a response to the story from Nell Freudenberger, and a Q&A with the author that ran online in conjunction with our issue. Enjoy.

One thing I admire about ‘Stars and Stripes’ is its fearlessness. The urgent narration, in a very bald and immediate first-person, tells the story of a friendship. The friend, Carlitos, is strikingly literal, charmless and unattractive, but he’s always himself: “I never knew anyone as authentic.” Santiago Roncagliolo seems utterly unconcerned with whether we like his two characters, and (as in life) that fact makes them irresistible. The other thing that got me about this story is Roncagliolo’s Lima. Writing about a place your readers don’t always know – and Roncagliolo’s audience is international – a writer is tempted by physical description. That description can be of beauty or ugliness or both, but it has to be intense, because the place you’re writing about has to seem temporarily to the reader like the only place on earth. Roncagliolo barely bothers with exterior description – a basset hound has a “melancholy face,” as if a basset hound could have any other - in favour of a kind of interior one. Each city has its peculiar social rhythm, the way that a pair of friends speak, and at a deeper level, relate in moments when they’re alone together. I don’t know the first thing about Lima, but Roncagliolo makes me feel it is a place with the personality of his story: less self-involved, more observant and more apt to enjoy the plain spectacle of life than most fiction from my own country. The final moments of the story, when the two friends meet accidentally in a cafe in California, are less about sharing the past than savouring the present, less about nostalgia than its opposite – something more like tolerance. – Nell Freudenberger, Best Young American Novelist 2007

Each of the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists answered a questionnaire on their influences and the role of the writer in public life. Here are Roncagliolo's answers:

Name the five writers you most admire at the moment (any period, language or genre).

Bertrand Rusell, Philip Roth, Yasunari Kawabata, Michel Houellebecq and William Shakespeare.

Have you published literary criticism?

Yes, but I stopped doing it to avoid hurting any of my friends. Sometimes you have to decide whose side you’re on.

Which languages do you read?

English, French, Portuguese and Catalan, as well as Spanish.

Do you have your own web page?

I had a blog while I was on a long promotional tour for two years. When my life became boring again, I shut it down.

Is your fiction your sole source of income? If not, what else do you live off?

I live off my books, but I take on journalism projects, scripts and translations if they interest me. Some of them also become books.

Should writers play a role in public life beyond the publication of their work? If so, in what way?

I used to think so, and wrote political novels. But experience has taught me to keep as far away as possible from public life. My latest book is a thriller about the Japanese sex market.

Click here to buy The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists

Granta 113: Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists

Pakistan is back in the news. Granta 112 offers a unique perspective on this complex country with reportage, fiction, poetry and art by some of the region’s brightest talents. In his Orwell Prize-shortlisted essay ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’, Declan Walsh provides an intimate portrait of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, where Abbottabad is located:

Getting to the frontier is deceptively easy. The old route curled through Attock, where a 400-year-old Moghul fort towers over the swirling confluence of the Kabul and Indus rivers. These days the visitor sweeps in on a slick, six-lane motorway from Islamabad, two hours to the east. The provincial capital, Peshawar – thought to derive from the Sanskrit for ‘city of men’ – squats at the foot of the Khyber Pass, thrumming with nervous energy. Parts retain the romantic exoticism of Kipling’s verse. Blind beggars roam the spice bazaars of the old city; veiled women dart between glittering jewellery shops; peacocks strut on the preened lawns of the governor’s colonial-era mansion. Everywhere else, though, there are garish splashes of modernity – chromed plazas selling mobile phones; tacky American fast-food joints; giant billboards advertising remedies for male baldness; and ‘slimming academies’ for women. Cheap Chinese rickshaws swarm through the raucous traffic. (Subscribers to the magazine can read the whole article here.)

Click here to buy Granta 112: Pakistan, featuring Lorraine Adams, Nadeem Aslam, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, Sarfraz Monzoor, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Basharat Peer, Jane Perlez and Kamila Shamsie.

Our New Voices series, which publishes fiction by emerging authors exclusively on the magazine’s website, continues with a new story this week. We also caught up with some of our other writers from the series: What did being a Granta new voice do for their careers? What are they working on now? Any advice for writers starting out?

Billy Kahora

It definitely garnered some international attention. I got into the Iowa International Writing Program partially on the strength of this – it has also helped with invitations to panels and talks while I’ve been in the U.S.

I am working on a creative non-fiction novella on Juba, Sudan and a novel based in Kenya.

To borrow from an Australian writer I met recently – the word writer is not a noun but really oriented around a verb. Forget everything else that comes with the idea of being a writer and just write. And write, and write. Structure your life around your writing, not writing around your life, if it is something you take seriously. And when you are not writing, read as much as you can ...

Read Billy Kahora’s story, The Gorilla’s Apprentice, or an interview with Billy.

Jessica Soffer

In a word: everything. The publication plucked me from the muddy and claustrophobic cave of scribbling where I’d lived for years and put me on some kind of map where I could begin to engage with others about my work. Until then, the engagement had been strictly critical (as in workshop, for example) but the publication etched my words – regardless of how flawed they may have been – into something more finite, more real, which offered me a little room to imagine that I might move people, as good writing has moved me my whole life. Until the work is ‘out there’, it’s hard to believe that’s possible. Though, of course, that’s the reason many writers write, and keep writing. On a more practical level, I began talking to editors and agents, each crucial in navigating me through the next stages.

I’ve just had the very wonderful news that my novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, will be published in 2013. I’ve been reeling – and working on some food writing, particularly on beloved authors and their quirky eating habits. Iraqi-Jewish and French cuisines are at the heart of Apricots and I’ve fallen in love with the language of food. For now, I can’t imagine writing about much else.

My advice is to keep the writing close to your chest for as long as you can. It’s so easy to corrupt things when you show them to the light too soon. Also, find readers you trust and don’t write under a rock forever. It’s possible to do all those things. I haven’t figured it out yet, but there are people who have and I tip my hat to them.

Read ‘Beginning, End’ by Jessica Soffer now.

Evie Wyld

Just being associated with Granta is enough to get people to prick their ears up, and having an interview, a short story and a biography as a single package on the website was really very useful. You’re able to impart a whole lot of information about yourself without feeling like you’re going on and on and being intrusive. I still get people directed from New Voices contacting me on my website.

I’m working on two things. I’m three quarters of the way through a second novel which is partly set in Australia and partly in the UK. It’s got sheep and sharks in it, but that’s all I can say at the moment, because all else may change. The other thing is a graphic memoir with illustrator Joseph Sumner, which is proving to be a long process but very well worth it. Lots of sharks in that one too.

Read your whole book out loud to yourself. If you trip up over words there’s something wrong with the sentence. That sounds like water divining but it works!

Evie Wyld contributed to our sex issue – read her memoir essay ‘Woman’s Body: An Owner’s Manual’ here. Her New Voices story was an advance extract from her novel After the Fire, A Still, Small Voice, which went on to win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

Visit the New Voices section for a full list of stories and interviews by thirteen writers. Our most recent is Jaime Karnes, whose story ‘Here Comes the Sun’ was published on Monday.

Russia is the ‘market focus’ of this year’s London Book Fair, one of the largest trade fairs in the publishing world. What can we expect to see from Russian literature in the coming years? We asked six leading literary translators to tell us what they’re working on.

Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

We’re presently at work on a collection of stories by Nikolai Leskov. Leskov was a slightly younger contemporary of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and in Russia he is considered virtually their equal. In the West, however, despite numerous translations over the years, he remains largely unknown. His work is extremely difficult to translate, because it is so embedded in Russian speech and the particulars of Russian life, but that also makes for the delight of attempting it. (A small example: ‘Lefty’ is one of the most playful and punning of the stories. In it ‘orderlies’ become ‘odourlies,’ a microscope becomes a ‘meagroscope,’ and the hero asks not to be put on the deck of the ship, ‘or I may get seaccups from the flustrations’). It will be a big collection, probably over 600 pages, including some his most famous pieces (‘The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’, ‘The Enchanted Wanderer’), but also quite a few lesser known things (‘Singlemind’, ‘The Spirit of Madame de Genlis’, ‘Deathless Golovan’).

At the same time, we’ve begun a collaboration with the American playwright Richard Nelson, translating Russian plays specifically for stage production. Our first script will be Turgenev’s A Month in the Country.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have collaborated on translations of over twenty works of Russian literature, of which the most recently published is Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

Caroline Walton

I am working on the final draft of my own book, The Besieged: a blend of history and memoir developed from the transcribed (and translated) testimonies of survivors of the 872-day siege of Leningrad. These are interwoven with my own experience of the city and its people. I focused on performers: actors, dancers, musicians – asking how their creativity helped to keep them alive and how it nourished their audiences. Although emotionally gruelling, the process of translating the testimonies was particularly smooth, as my subjects were only too ready to explain concepts I did not understand – such as dystrophy, when the starving body starts to consume itself.

I also translated excerpts from diaries of the period. One diarist, an Orientalist working at the Hermitage, wrote: Somewhere around the 26th and 28th December 1941 I finished an incredibly stupid story… ‘Two Travels to the Big House’. He wrote the last six words in English. Their coded meaning tells us that he was twice called in for interrogation at secret police headquarters. His assumption that the local NKVD would not understand English must have proved correct, because he not only survived the siege: he escaped the gulag and the firing squad too. Perhaps an instance of translation saving a life.

The Besieged by Caroline Walton will be published by Biteback books in September.

Angela Livingstone

I am finishing my translation of Marina Tsvetaeva’s 1927 verse-drama ‘Phaedra’ and three related long poems of hers. When translating poetry, I feel at moments a pleasure which is not like any other and which outweighs all the moments of despair. What is that pleasure? To describe it, I’ve thought of invoking the main image in ‘Attempt at a Room’ (one of the three long poems). This strange work is engaged in creating a room in which to meet another poet, loved but distant. In the course of it, three walls, plus ceiling and floor, are established. In the end they all break down. Yet the strongly constructed poem remains, and with it an inescapable impression that it is itself the desired room – and the meeting is taking place. Similarly, the pleasure felt in the best moments of translating resembles an experience of being with the distant other poet in the carefully constructed ‘room’ of the translation – an experience neither metaphysical nor sentimental.

Angela Livingstone taught literature at the University of Essex for thirty-one years and has translated works by Andrei Platonov, Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva.

Arch Tait

My translation of Ludmila Ulitskaya’s prize-laden Daniel Stein, Interpreter has just been published, in time for the Book Fair. Her ‘novel in documents’ tells the real-life story of a Polish Jew who interpreted for the Gestapo and saved hundreds of lives. Another veteran novelist coming to London is Vladimir Makanin, whose novel Underground will be published in English in 2012.

Young writers under 25 are being brought to the Fair by the excellent Debut publishing project, administered by Russian Booker Prize-winner Olga Slavnikova and Natasha Perova of Glas New Russian Writing. Stories by Dmitry Biryukov and Danila Davydov have been snapped up by Dalkey Archive Press and Words Without Borders, and I’m working on a lively neo-Beatnik novella by Irina Bogatyreva. Irina Prokhorova, editor of Moscow’s ground-breaking New Literary Review, is another star whose work will be translated in the coming year.

Arch Tait has translated work by many of today’s leading Russian writers. His website is www.russianwriting.com.

Hugh Aplin

I’ve recently been revising three translations of Russian classics for reissue in the summer: Chekhov’s novella The Story of a Nobody, Dostoevsky’s first novel Poor People, and Tolstoy’s stories ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ and ‘The Devil’. I confess to approaching the task with some trepidation, for whenever I look afresh at any of my translations, I invariably see ways in which I think they might have been improved. I wonder whether all translators experience the same nagging doubts and the vague sense of dissatisfaction? However, it all proved less of a trial than I’d feared. Not only are the original works marvellous things to reread in themselves, but it was pleasing to find much that I liked in the translations too. Not that that prevented me from making a hefty number of alterations to all three texts. And now I’m perfectly happy with the results – at least until I come to read the proofs.

Hugh Aplin is Head of Russian at Westminster School. He has been shortlisted for each of the first three Rossica Translation prizes for his translations of Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov and Mikhail Ageyev.

Our Russia issue contains fiction by Victor Pelevin and Andrei Platonov; Colin Thubron in Siberia; Vitali Vitaliev on the vodka escape, and more.

More online exclusives on translation: Rowan Ricardo Phillips on translating from Catalan, and Natasha Wimmer on rendering Bolaño’s sex scenes.

Our new issue, Granta 114: Aliens, launches officially tonight in London. Entry is free and unreserved – come to Daunt Books, 83 Marylebone High St., London W1U 4QW at 6.30 p.m. to meet fellow readers, as well as the magazine’s editors and contributors including Mark Gevisser, Philip Oltermann and Madeleine Thien.

The evening also marks the culmination of our participatory project, ‘Am I An Alien?’ Readers are invited to publish responses to the question – with text, photos or video – by posting them on our Facebook page. Visit now to join the conversation.

Granta holds a series of events internationally for the release of each issue. (The front-page image shows mariachis performing at one of our events to celebrate the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists issue.) Visit our events page for a full listing, including events in Paris and New York next week. We also post news of events on our Twitter feed and Facebook page.

Watch a slideshow of ‘Contacts’, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s photo essay from the issue, with a special podcast on our artwork.

See also... ‘Cosmic Migration’, artistic director Michael Salu on his design for this issue’s cover.

As we continue to celebrate the release of our latest issue, Granta 114: Aliens, tonight the magazine’s Deputy Editor Ellah Allfrey will lead a discussion with contributors Mark Gevisser and Dinaw Mengestu.

Mark Gevisser is a renowned South African journalist; Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethopian-born novelist raised in the USA. The two writers will discuss the role of the writer with a focus on the question, ‘Participant or observer?’ What happens when the writer becomes a part of the story he is relating?
Richard Dowden, Director of the Royal African Society, will introduce the evening.

– 6.30 p.m., Brunei Suite SOAS, London WC1H 0XG

Mark Gevisser is well known for his biography of Thabo Mbeki, South Africa’s second democratically-elected president. His piece in ‘Aliens’ covers more personal territory. It is a portrait of two of his acquaintances, older black gay men from Soweto. Married with families in the townships and ‘fishing’ for partners in Johannesburg, these men’s double lives reflect something of the country’s own political history. Yet the piece is also a commemoration of an intimate and very particular underground culture that could only thrive in apartheid South Africa.

Dinaw Mengestu has written two award-winning novels, Children of the Revolution and How to Read the Air, and was chosen last summer as one of the New Yorker’s 20 under 40. He has also reported on the war in Darfur for Rolling Stone and on the conflict in Uganda for Jane. ‘They Always Come In the Night’, from the latest issue of our magazine, brought him to Walikale, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s most troubled territory. Mengestu calls it ‘a place as awash in natural wealth as it is in armed groups [...] who have wreaked a collective havoc on a population living in what could be an Edenic corner of the earth.’ There, he attempts to find the truth about the FDLR, the elusive Rwandan Hutu militia group that continues to terrorize the region.

See also ... Contacts: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s photo essay from the issue, plus a special podcast on our artwork.

Visit our events page for a full list of readings and launch parties over the coming weeks – in England, the USA, Canada and Paris.

Granta’s editor John Freeman announces the arrival of the magazine’s first e-book edition for Kindle.

I’m sentimental about paperbacks. My favourite bookstore in the world is City Lights in San Francisco, the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States. They made their mark publishing a pocket poetry series with Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; books small enough to fit in your back pocket. It’s hard to imagine, but in 1955 this was revolutionary.

Granta has never been – and I doubt it will ever be – small enough to put in your pocket. The memoirs and stories and reported pieces we publish are types of writing that benefit from expansive space. We want to look at the world in depth, at length. Two qualities often at odds with the way we live and consume information these days.

In thirty-one years of publishing, Granta has never come out in a different format. Ever since Bill Buford and Jonathan Levi took over Cambridge’s student literary journal and gave it new life as a paperback magazine it has been just that: a paperback quarterly full of new writing.

But for all of us the problem of portability remains, especially in a world of shrinking natural resources. For instance, our latest issue of Granta began its life as a tree in Sweden. It was turned into paper, then trucked down to our printer in Italy. Once the words of Lucía Puenzo, Patricio Pron and others were printed on the paper and bound between covers, workers loaded it back on to trucks and it was driven to a warehouse outside Heathrow.

And that’s just the beginning. If you bought Granta at City Lights, for instance, there would still have been thousands of miles for your copy to travel from Heathrow. It would have been put on an airfreight plane to New York City. It was then loaded on to a new set of trucks, maybe one with a stencilled name like ‘Cool’ or ‘Kurt’ on the driver-side door, and driven to Jackson, Tennessee, unloaded and sorted. It didn’t stick around for long though, because it was then loaded back on to a plane, or a truck, and driven to San Francisco, where it was sorted again, batched, put into a smaller van and finally unloaded at 261 Columbus Avenue.

There is, I think, something almost picaresque about this journey. I would say heroic if that word wasn’t so mangled and abused. But there is, now, a different way to get Granta. If you want to read the magazine on a Kindle, your copy can arrive in under a minute. An improvement in speed of 40,000 per cent. Perhaps this is the way of the future. Trees in Sweden will live a little longer. We don’t know. But a large part of me hopes the journey of the physical paperback continues, because as much as e-book technology will reduce our carbon footprint, a world where everyone must have a $140 device to read is certainly not quite as democratic as the one we live in now. After all, you can just as easily go to a library and read Granta there.

The most important thing for us is that Granta can be read wherever and however people are reading. So if you like to read on a device, what I want to say is this: we’ve been hearing you. Follow the link here if you’d like to see what we’re saying in return. ■

Buy Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists for the Kindle now.

All the contributors to our latest issue have been recommended by previous Best Young Novelists, who have written responses to their stories. Read:
– Edwidge Danticat on Alejandro Zambra
– Yiyun Li on Alberto Olmos
– Chris Offutt on Matías Néspolo
– Toby Litt on Carlos Labbé

Our series of introductions to the writers in our current issue, the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists, continues. Today, we publish reponses to stories by David Guterson and Edwidge Danticat, both of whom were featured in the first Best of Young American Novelists issue in 1996. Click on the author photos to visit their pages, which also include interview answers on literary influences and the writer’s role in public life.

‘the frisson of a balanced thematic finality ...’ (David Guterson)

‘the heartfelt vulnerability of testimony...’ (Edwidge Danticat)

Visit the page for the current issue to read stories by five of the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists, as well as introductions to other writers on the new list by previous Best Young Novelists including Jonathan Safran Foer, Yiyun Li and A.L. Kennedy. You’ll also find a full list of web exclusives, including our ‘snapshots’ series.

We continue our series of introductions to the writers in our new issue, the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists. Previous Best Young Novelists have read and responded to all the stories, and today we publish responses by Kevin Brockmeier, Maile Meloy, Daniel Alarcón, Mona Simpson and Tibor Fischer. Click on the picture of the writer to read these, as well interview answers by all of them on their influences, and what role, if any, the writer should play in public life.

Kevin Brockmeier: ‘A single breathless expression of grief, of grief and bewilderment over a life turned bitter in an instant...’
(This story is free to read online)

Maile Meloy: ‘It moves through the heat and the crush of Havana in a sex-laced, smoky haze...’ (Read this story here)

Daniel Alarcón: ‘Like a poet, she trafficks in images...’

Mona Simpson: ‘Solano has a deft fetching touch...’

Tibor Fischer: ‘Everyone is everywhere...’

Visit the issue page to see a full list of the writers, or read the introduction to the issue by Granta en Español’s editors, Valerie Miles and Aurelio Major. You can also read about the launch of the issue in Madrid last month.

Buy the issue now in English or Spanish; or subscribe to the magazine.

The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists is Granta's first ever fully translated issue. The English edition is with subscribers now, and has been in UK bookshops since Thursday 25 November, and the US since Monday 6 December. The Spanish edition can be bought here. Read the introduction to the issue by the founding co-editors of Granta en Español, Aurelio Major and Valerie Miles, here. Alternatively, subscribe to the magazine to receive it straight to your door four times a year.

The next three writers to be introduced by previous Best Young Novelists are Sònia Hernández, Matías Néspolo and Santiago Roncagliolo. Click on the images of the three below to read their answers to a questionnaire on their influences, and the role of the writer in public life.

Stewart O'Nan: ‘A tale of dis-ease that leaves the reader chuckling uneasily...’

Chris Offutt: ‘The narrative is enriched by what the reader already knows ...’

Nell Freudenberger: ‘The urgent narration, in a very bald and immediate first-person, tells the story of a friendship...’

Visit the issue page to see a full list of the writers, or read the introduction to the issue by Granta en Español’s editors, Valerie Miles and Aurelio Major. You can also read about the launch of the issue in Madrid last month.

Last week Granta published its first ever fully translated issue, the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists. The English edition is with subscribers now, and has been in UK bookshops since Thursday 25 November, and the US since Monday 6 December. The Spanish edition can be bought here. Read the introduction to the issue by the founding co-editors of Granta en Español, Aurelio Major and Valerie Miles, here. Alternatively, subscribe to the magazine to receive it straight to your door four times a year.

The next three writers to be introduced by previous Best Young Novelists are Elvira Navarro, Alberto Olmos and Pola Oloixarac. Click on the images of the three below to read their answers to a questionnaire on their influences, and the role of the writer in public life.

A.L. Kennedy: ‘Physical details threaten and frustrate, pain is present and yet deadened...’

Yiyun Li: ‘Robbing us when we are the least prepared...’

Kate Wheeler: ‘Couplings and points of view ooze together like molten glass or ice cream melting on hot pavement...’

Visit the issue page to see a full list of the writers, or read the introduction to the issue by Granta en Español’s editors, Valerie Miles and Aurelio Major. You can also read about the launch of the issue in Madrid last month.

The next two writers in our Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists series.

Click on the images of the next two below to read their answers to a questionnaire on their influences, and the role of the writer in public life.

Jonathan Safran Foer: ‘a reminder of what can be gained when some of the expectations of the form are dispensed with...’

Toby Litt: ‘This is a fiction that goes beyond metamorphosis...’

Visit the issue page to see a full list of the writers, or read the introduction to the issue by Granta en Español’s editors, Valerie Miles and Aurelio Major. You can also read about the launch of the issue in Madrid last month.

On the 29th of November, Granta is kicking off its final launch festival for 2010, this one in celebration of the new issue, the Best of Young Spanish-language Novelists. Every quarter, Granta hosts a series of events for the new issue, but new writing isn’t the only thing in the menu. From Pisco Sour cocktails to a literary wine tasting featuring cheese, chocolate, Peruvian canapes, wines from Spain and Argentina, and mariachis, you’ll enjoy a sensory tour of of Spain and Latin America. Scroll down for a full listing of events.

From our ‘PAKISTAN pop!’ party, which raised funds for Oxfam’s flood appeal

For Granta 113, we’re bringing our literary caravan to London, New York, San Francisco and LA (not to mention New York and Boston in the New Year). From talks about the Nobel Prize and its impact on Spanish-language literature at the Gabarron Foundation (NYC) and Instituto Cervantes (London) to a discussion on the art and business of translation at UCL (London) and Columbia University (NYC), there’s something for everyone’s taste. When Granta comes to the West Coast, events include a biligual discussion for high school students, panel discussions at UC Berkeley and San Jose State University and a reading at the extraordinary bookshop City Lights. In LA we’re keeping it light with a holiday party featuring readings by two Young Novelists and social games at the Crocker Club in Downtown LA, heart of Los Angeles’s creative renaissance.

Of course, this week would not have been possible without the exemplary support of all our event partners, mentioned in each listing. Please come and join Granta writers, editors, and readers old and new, to celebrate this very special issue.

– Saskia Vogel, Publicity Associate

Monday 29 November: Translating Culture: From Spanish to English
Translators Edith Grossman, Alfred Mac Adam, Idra Novey and novelist Pola Oloixarac discuss the art and business of translation.

Columbia University, 501 Dodge Hall, NYC 10027, 8 p.m. Please RSVP at events@granta.com

Tuesday 30 November: Introducing the Best of Young Spanish-language Novelists
Novelists Alberto Olmos and Antonio Ortuño and editors Aurelio Major and Valerie Miles discuss the list and the work in the issue.

Feria Internacional de Libro de Guadalajara, Salon Elias Nandina, Alemania 1370, Moderna, 44190 Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico.

Thursday 2 December: Introducing The Best of Young Spanish-language Novelists: The NYC Launch
Join Carlos Labbé, Pola Oloixarac and Carlos Yushimito to celebrate the launch of Granta 113.

Idlewild Books, 12 W. 19th, NYC 10011, 7 p.m. Please RSVP at events@granta.com

Friday 3 December: Peruvian Literature, the Nobel Prize and What It Means for Spanish-language Writing
Dr. Juan de Castro, Pola Oloixarac and Carlos Yushimito discuss the importance of Mario Vargas Llosa’s win and what it means for Spanish-language literature. Pisco Sour cocktails and Peruvian canapés to follow. Sponsored by the Peruvian Mission to the United Nations and the Gabarron Foundation.

Gabarron Foundation, 149 East 38th Street, New York, NY 10016, 7 p.m. Please RSVP at events@granta.com

Monday December 6: Las Americas Norte y Sur: South America's Best Young Novelists talk to Californian High School Students
Carlos Labbe, Andres Felipe Solano and Carlos Yushimito read and discuss their work. A bilingual event in Spanish and English.

The Marin School, 100 Ebbtide Avenue, Sausalito, CA 94965, 10.30-11.45 a.m.

Monday 6 December: The Future of Spanish-language Writing
Daniel Alarcón, Carlos Labbé, Andrés Felipe Solano and Carlos Yushimito in discussion.

Maud Fife, 315 Wheeler Hall, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, 4 p.m. Please RSVP at events@granta.com

Monday 6 December: New Lights in Spanish-language Literature
Daniel Alarcón, Carlos Labbé, Andrés Felipe Solano and Carlos Yushimito read and discuss their work.

City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Ave, San Fransisco, CA 94133, 7.30 p.m. Please RSVP at events@granta.com

Tuesday 7 December: How to be a Young Spanish-language Novelist
Daniel Alarcón, Carlos Labbé, Andrés Felipe Solano and Carlos Yushimito: readings and conversation.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, Room 225-229, San Jose State University, San José, CA 95192, 1 p.m.

Wednesday 8 December: The Granta 113 Holiday Party
Please join Granta, Libros Schmibros, and critic Amy Nicholson for a holiday celebration in honor of the launch of Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists. David Kipen of Libros Schmibros will host a discussion with novelists Carlos Labbé (Chile) and Carlos Yushimito (Peru) about their work and making the list. Then, guests can choose to participate in a short game session, hosted by Amy Nicholson. There will be special drinks offers and prizes. RSVP is not essential, but will guarantee a place inside the Crocker Club’s Ghost Bar. The discussion starts at 8 p.m. Game starts around 9 p.m.

The Crocker Club Ghost Bar, 453 South Spring Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013, 8 p.m. Please RSVP at events@granta.com

Thursday 10 February: Spanish Writing Round Table
Two round table discussions in Spanish about creative writing will be held with Andrés Barba, Federico Falco, Rodrigo Hasbún, Carlos Labbé, Javier Montes, Elvira Navarro and Carlos Yushimito. The round tables will be moderated by editor John Freeman and writer and former director of NYC´s Instituto Cervantes, Antonio Muñoz Molina. Hosted by the Creative Writing in Spanish Program at New York University.

King Juan Carlos Center, NYU, 53 Washington Square South, Ste. 201 NYC, 10012. Please email kjc.info@nyu.edu to RSVP.

Additional events in planning
Providence, RI Brown Bookstore event with Carlos Yushimito (18 Feb)
Ithaca, NY Cornell Bookstore event with Rodrigo Hasbún and Carlos Yushimito (10 Dec)
Boston, MA Reading with Ilan Stavans and Carlos Yushimito at Porter Square Books (13 Jan)

UK

Monday 29 November: Peruvian Literature, the Nobel Prize and What It Means for Spanish-language Writing
Santiago Roncagliolo and John Freeman discuss the importance of Mario Vargas Llosa’s win and what it means for Spanish-language literature. Pisco Sour cocktails to follow. Sponsored by the Peruvian Embassy.

Instituto Cervantes, 102 Eaton Square, London SW1W 9AN, 6.30 p.m. Please RSVP at events@granta.com

NEW VENUE Tuesday 30 November: Translating Culture: From Spanish to English
Andrés Barba, Carlos Fernández López, Javier Montes and Bill Swainson discuss the art and business of translation.

University College London, Anatomy Gavin de Beer Lecture Theatre, the Anatomy Building, Gower Street, London WC1 6BT, 6.30 p.m. Please RSVP at events@granta.com

Wednesday 1 December: Introducing The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists: The London Launch
Andrés Barba, Sònia Hernández, Javier Montes, Matías Néspolo, Andrés Neuman, Santiago Roncagliolo and Andrés Felipe Solano discuss their work and what it means to make the list.

Foyles, 113-119 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H 0EB, 6.30 p.m. Please RSVP at events@granta.com

Thursday 2 December: Noche Bilingüe
Andrés Barba, Sònia Hernández, Javier Montes, Matías Néspolo, Andrés Neuman, Santiago Roncagliolo and Andrés Felipe Solano read and discuss their work in Spanish, with live English translation. Reception to follow. Sponsored by the Instituto Cervantes and in association with the Spanish Bookshop.

Instituto Cervantes, 102 Eaton Square, London SW1W 9AN, 6.30 p.m. Please RSVP at events@granta.com

Friday 3 December: Sabor a Mí: A Night of Wine and Words
Andrés Barba, Javier Montes, Matías Néspolo, Andrés Neuman, Santiago Roncagliolo and Andrés Felipe Solano pair readings with new wines from Spain and Argentina, selected and presented by Theatre of Wine. Peruvian canapés, a selection of cheeses, Colombian chocolate, drinks and live mariachi music to follow. With support from the Colombian, Mexican and Peruvian Embassies and Theater of Wine.

Canning House, Canning House, 2 Belgrave Square, London SW1X 8PJ, 7 p.m. - 11 p.m. £12/£10 conc. Ticket price includes a copy of Granta 113, the wine tasting, canapes, and an open bar. Please contact Canning House at +44 (0)20 7235 2303 for tickets.

Click here to buy The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists now.

This week Granta publishes its first ever fully translated issue, the Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists. The English edition is with subscribers now, and will be in UK bookshops Thursday 25 November, and is the US on Monday 6 December. The Spanish edition can be bought here. Read the introduction to the issue by the founding co-editors of Granta en Español, Aurelio Major and Valerie Miles, here. Alternatively, subscribe to the magazine to receive it straight to your door four times a year.

From Borges to García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Marías or Bolaño, the Spanish language has given us some of the 20th century’s most beloved writers. But as the reach of Spanish culture extends far beyond Spain and Latin America, and the US tilts towards a majority Hispanic population, the time is right to ask, who and what is next in Spanish-language fiction?

In this, the first translated issue of Granta’s Best of Young Novelists, a distinguished panel of six judges – Edgardo Cozarinsky, Isabel Hilton, Francisco Goldman, Mercedes Monmany, and Granta en Español’s editors, Valerie Miles and Aurelio Major – looks to new writing across the Spanish-speaking world and asks, ‘Who are the most promising novelists telling the stories from the old and new worlds today?’

Over the coming weeks we will be introducing each of the writers, as well as responses by previous Best Young Novelists to all their stories. Click on the images of the first four below to read their answers to a questionnaire on their influences, and the role of the writer in public life.

Adam Thirlwell: ‘There are very minute ways in which a person might differ from a monster...’

Christopher Coake: ‘A world dangerously suffused with the uncanny...’

Ben Rice: ‘They have been where we have yet to go...’

Esther Freud: ‘Small people in a vast land, giving meaning to their lives...’

Visit the issue page to see a full list of the writers, or read the introduction to the issue by Granta en Español’s editors, Valerie Miles and Aurelio Major. You can also read about the launch of the issue in Madrid last month.

Granta recently launched a fortnightly podcast, which is available on iTunes and as audio files on our site. This page will be updated and reposted with each new episode. Be sure to subscribe to our feed to stay up to date with these.

Episode 2: Elizabeth McCracken’s reading from her story ‘Property’ at the same event, as well as her interview with John Freeman.

Episode 1: A.L. Kennedy reads a humorous piece about the joys and neuroses of love from an unpublished manuscript at our launch event for our current issue, ‘Going Back’, at the British Library. [alk jf]

A.L. Kennedy and John Freeman at the British Library

Jemma Birrell and Emily Greenhouse report on a unique evening in Paris – part of the launch of Granta 111: Going Back – with photos by Lauren Goldenberg

Granta held its first ever event on the continent on Monday night, at Paris’s legendary Shakespeare and Company bookshop. Next to the antiquarian bookseller, in front of a buzzing crowd of Parisians and English speakers from around the globe, editor John Freeman chaired a discussion on memory and writing with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C.K. Williams, poet and acclaimed writer Owen Sheers and Nathan Englander, one of the most talked-about fiction writers today.

Sylvia Whitman, current owner of the shop and daughter of founder George Whitman, introduces the event

Nathan Englander had graciously stepped in that afternoon to replace Mavis Gallant, doyenne of the short story, who fell ill and was unable to participate as planned.

On the phone to the bookshop that same morning, Gallant spoke of her excitement to speak on a panel on the theme of memory. All fiction, as she sees it, comes from memory and the imagination; she immediately launched into her own memories. She spoke about ‘Across the Bridge’, a story she wrote in the nineties, which takes place in 1953. She’d been churning away on the story one afternoon when she realized she hadn’t had a bite of food all day. Popping out of the house for a moment, she was momentarily baffled by the cars and the men’s haircuts she encountered in the streets – for just those few seconds she really expected to see things as she had in the 50s.

The crowd seen from the shop’s upstairs library

She told of another story she’d written, one that includes a scene with a boy jumping out of the first floor window in his pyjamas after a fight with his mother. The father stood watching (she wrote about a tear in his eyes behind his dark glasses). Some time after the English publication, Gallant read the French translation to check it for errors; it was only then that she realized this story did not in fact come from her imagination but from a memory. She had witnessed the scene. She even remembered the family concerned – to whom she promptly sent the book.

John Freeman and Nathan Englander

At the event, Nathan Englander discussed his own kind of memory. He has been preoccupied lately with two kinds: cultural memory and emotional memory and described himself as having a photographic emotional memory. In his novel The Ministry of Special Cases, set in Argentina, he focussed on the way governments construct false histories and ‘truth’.

C.K. Williams and Owen Sheers

In Gallant’s honour, John Freeman read a passage from her story ‘The Doctor’, in which memory is an another country and the past can render each of us an exile. C.K. Williams, a friend of Gallant’s, spoke of her influence on his work. He read his ‘Bianca Burning’ from Granta: Sex, and described revisiting this young circus seductress fifty years after encountering her ‘lush, ardent … amorously advanced’ eighteen-year-old self. He Googled this Bianca, in fact, and found her on Facebook: a curious stumble through this new world of memory in which the ‘past becomes accessible’. Williams’ co-panellist Owen Sheers spoke of the conflation of memory and imagination, and of memory’s distillation – how you need distance from the subject and place in order to write vividly about it. He had recently been sent back to Zimbabwe to write a piece for Granta and was looking at what had changed, how the country had become ‘unstitched’ over time.

Also published recently... an audio interview with Elizabeth McCracken, a Best Young American Novelist, in which she discusses her story ‘Property’ – printed in our latest issue, ‘Going Back’.

Emily Greenhouse reports on the launch of a landmark issue.

‘I feel like Methuselah,’ began Salman Rushdie, introducing a reading from Granta 109. ‘I first appeared in Granta 3’, thirty years ago, he reminded his audience. ‘That’s pre-post-modern.’

Rushdie was joined by contributors A.L. Kennedy, Elizabeth McCracken and Richard Russo for a panel on Granta writing, past and present. Held at the British Library, last night’s event, chaired by Editor John Freeman, marked the launch of issue 111: Going Back – and of the online archive, which allows immediate access of all issues from 1 to 111.

John Freeman, Elizabeth McCracken and Salman Rushdie

Each writer on the panel recounted how he or she first became a Granta author – in certain cases, how they first heard of the magazine.

Russo spoke of feeling part of a movement as soon as he appeared in Granta 19: More Dirt. ‘I was thrilled,’ he said, ‘but also surprised: I didn’t feel that dirty! I remember looking at the piece (‘Fishing with Wussy’), and thinking, maybe it should be dirtier.’

A.L. Kennedy was chosen to appear in Granta as a Best Young British Novelist. Salman Rushdie was on the judging panel. She told the audience that she hadn’t – and hasn’t – always met such luck in submitting her pieces to magazines like Granta. That’s the point of submitting, though, she said – ‘You’re not in it most of the time: which makes it good.’

Elizabeth McCracken pointed out that she was unique in being chosen to appear in Granta 54: Best of Young American Novelists before a novel of hers had been published. This, she explained, landed her firmly on the ‘Who the hell?!’ side of the issue’s author spectrum (which begins, in her imagination, with the ‘Why, of course!’ authors).

Bill Buford, the editor responsible for the magazine’s 1979 relaunch at Cambridge university, ‘grabbed’ Rushdie at a Jonathan Cape Christmas party just months after he reimagined the magazine. Buford then 'dragged' the surprised author across the room towards a briefcase full of copies of the issue, which contained two chapters of Midnight’s Children in print. Rushdie had had no idea. ‘Basically,’ he chuckled, ‘Bill stole it.’

The conversation turned to the construction of memoir. Russo, whose novels centre on a hometown just like his own, has until this issue never fully confronted the real Gloversville. He confessed his impulse to write about the mysteries of his parents, his grandparents, his hometown – but never his own life.

Rushdie divulged that he has begun writing his memoir, after years of inaccurate articles about his life written by others, and general prompting at cocktail parties. Eventually, he realized, ‘the only way to get rid of these myths is to tell the story.’

The discussion rounded off with an audience question about young writer lists, such as Granta’s ‘Best of Young’ author series, or the New Yorker’s recent, much-discussed ‘20 under 40’ selection.

Russo, who just helped compile a similar list as editor of The Best American Short Stories 2010, warned of the dangers of ascribing genius judging by youth alone. ‘Great talent,’ he said, ‘does always announce itself. What it doesn’t always do is announce itself right on schedule.’

Whether the lists are to be trumpeted on high, or vilified, or ignored, the four writers agreed that it’s better to have them than not at all. ‘It’s a nice thing,’ McCracken closed, ‘to start vicious arguments about literature.’

Richard Russo and A.L. Kennedy

The evening ended with drinks in the lobby, among special exhibits of previously unseen letters, cover art and back issues of the magazine from before its ’79 reincarnation. A typewriter was also on hand for anonymous messages - a poem was left which, we’d like to think, was intended to capture both the ephemeral nature of a literary panel, and the permanence of the literature itself…:

ink is excreted
to delay predators
when you read this
i will be gone

An audio recording of the event will be available soon. Visit our events page to see details for the rest of the week – including this evening’s panel, ‘Is America Over?’, a discussion at Foyles on Charing Cross Road at 6.30 p.m. with Richard Russo and Elizabeth McCracken.