Photo by Dan Sinclair.

Jon McGregor talks about reworking his first published story ‘What the Sky Sees’ from the female perspective and reads from both the original and updated version, ‘In Winter the Sky’. He also discusses his enduring fascination with Lincolnshire and his new short story collection, This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You.

The Granta Podcast Episode 30. by Ted Hodgkinson Granta

‘In Winter the Sky’ is taken from This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You by Jon McGregor, published by Bloomsbury on 2 February 2012 at £14.99. © Jon McGregor 2012.

Exit Strategies Live
6 February, doors open at 6.30 p.m., event starts at 7 p.m., The Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3BL. £7, including a copy of Granta 118. Please RSVP to events@granta.com to reserve your place. Payment will be taken at the door.

In this special edition of Liars' League, Jon McGregor joins us to read from and discuss ‘In Winter the Sky’, his first-ever published story, found in Granta 78, and recently revised for his new story collection and the online edition of Exit Strategies. But first, actors from the live fiction salon perform stories of desire and conflict from Granta’s latest issue.

From his first story collection, Esther Stories, on to his most recent novel, Love Shame and Love, Peter Orner has established himself as one of the most distinctive American voices of his generation. His work has appeared in Granta 111: Going Back and in the online edition, with ‘At The Kitchen Table’. He spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about memory, learning to love your characters, the importance of animals in fiction and Chicagoland.

TH: Reading this book got me thinking about the capricious way that memory often works: not necessarily in neat chronological order but associatively, moving outwards in a starburst from one image to the next. Taken together I began to see the novel as a compendium of images that were bursting from the Popper family’s memory banks. There’s actually a scene in the book when Leo Popper eats a cookie as a parody of Proust’s madelene; who is clearly another writer fixated on being truthful about how memory works, or doesn’t. Is there a truthfulness about the function of memory in this lateral structural movement of the book and did you find it a challenge to trace the lines of memory across for generations of a single family?

PO: I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. I wonder if the word memory itself doesn’t somehow send the wrong message. There’s something about it that suggests truth when it is so often not even close. Scientists and criminal lawyers have been proving this for decades now. Our memories lie like a rug, as my grandmother used to say, and then laugh her head off. Or did she? See, I’m doing it again. My grandmother who we called Sally Grandma and not Grandma Sally used to say, ‘Don’t lie like a rug.’ But when she said it, she was saying don’t be a lazy meshuggener. So she wasn’t talking about memory and lying at all, but only about the fact that I was a slug. I still am a slug. Where was I? Our memories lie. And I’ve come to also believe that our own autobiographies are merely compilations of the greatest hits of our own bullshit. How often to do we actually tell the truth about ourselves? I think in this novel I was trying to trace the strange way memory operates and how it’s so tied up in fiction that it’s almost indistinguishable. It is indistinguishable. The first fiction man ever created was when – for the very fist time – a single hairy cave man began to recount something that happened yesterday. I wanted to build a book around a person that can’t stop doing this, that remembers and lies and remembers and lies . . .

Though the novel certainly has a wholeness it is constructed of lots of small moving parts: fragments of letters, brief vignettes, oblique and not exactly ‘plot driven’ chapters through which a large cast of characters move. Taken individually the sections of the book operate in a similar way to your short stories – capturing a moment or an image and distilling it down to a potent essence. Did writing this novel allow you the possibility of seeing your characters further into their lives and do you think of plot as something you have to resist in order to write fully realized people?

I’m not sure I resist plot as much as feel that the conventional definition of plot is a little cramped. For me the strange moments that make up our lives are plot. I forget but there must be some classical definition of what the word plot actually means. Hang on. I’m going to go look it up. ‘A small area of planted ground’. No. ‘An intrigue, conspiracy, What fascinates me the most about living on earth are the people I will never know. cabal’. I like that but no. Wait, ‘the main story of a literary work’. That’s it but it’s dull as hell. It isn’t that I don’t think something should happen in stories, and I hope things happen in mine, but what fascinates me the most about living on earth are the people I will never know. All the people I walk down the street and see, I will never, ever know what they are thinking, what’s gone on in their lives. So for me, character, the creation of a character on a flat page is the most exciting thing. It’s less the ‘what happened’ and more the memories they lug around, the loves, the regrets.

And as you say, I guess I try and zero in on the quieter moments of their lives in order to give characters life. This morning at the coffee shop down the street I watched a guy reading a little book. He was really into the book and he was holding it really close to his face. I wondered if this was because he was nearsighted or because he was loving the little book so much he wanted to get as close as possible to the words. It may well have been the first reason, something wrong with his eyes, but I like the second one better. And so I imagined (probably wrongly) that I had a small window in this guy’s life. I’ll bet he’s still there, reading that little book.

Some of these characters reappear, albeit in a different incarnation, from your first book of stories. The character of Seymour Popper also appears in your short story, ‘The Raft’, but he seems very different in the novel: he’s much less demonstrative in some ways. Did returning to the character prompt you to see him in a new light?

I’m sure you’re right that he’s different now. To be honest I didn’t go back and re-read the stories about Seymour before writing about him again for the new book. I think I didn’t want to be influenced by my previous imaginations of him. I do know that I missed him, whoever he is. And I wanted to bring him back to life. The difference might be that ‘The Raft’ is almost entirely from the perspective of a little kid, where in Love and Shame and Love I try and take in the totality of his life. And people Our own autobiographies are merely compilations of the greatest hits of our own bullshit. change, of course, or maybe they don’t. But our vision of the people we have loved changes, put it that way. And I love Seymour. I love the fictional guy and the the guy he’s based on too, and both never stay especially consistent in my head. I remember once I was walking to my grandparents’ house, my actual grandparents’ house, and on the way this cat started following me. I must have been ten or so. So the cat follows me to their house. They aren’t home but the back door is always open. I go inside and lock the cat in the bathroom with a little plate of dirt, you know, kind of like my own idea of kitty litter. Then I go and raid the refrigerator. My grandparents come home. By this time I’ve forgotten about the cat. My grandfather goes to the bathroom. He starts screaming. Totally freaking out. This is a guy who captained a ship in World War II. A cat in the bathroom totally unhinges him. So, our real people, as well as our fictional people, are always acting in ways they aren’t supposed to, according to what we understand about their characters. My grandfather weighed something like 265 and he was no match for that cat.

Animals and sometimes insects in the book are often creatures whose plight seems to embody the whole of the human comedy and tragedy that encircles them. The fate of a fly seems poignant and absurd in a way that recalls the Popper family’s struggle as he wanders across a desk lamp and wonders where all the other flies flew. ‘And I alone’ it thinks ‘I alone lived to . . . lived to what?’ The Popper family dog is a central character and at one point is tellingly described as being more affected by silence than by hunger. Do you think that animals, particularly family pets, can be portals into the stormy core of a family and does part of their power in the novel come from the way they seem to be often overlooked by the Poppers?

Totally totally portals, I love this idea. Funny, I was just talking about Max above and I hadn’t even read this question yet . . . I’m sitting here in my garage in San Francisco with my dog. Bud is very bored of watching me type. Her name is Daisy, which embarrasses me when I am at the dog park, so I call her Bud. She feels overlooked most days. But she knows everything about me, all the things I lie about.

The Chicago you describe here has a particular almost mythic quality to it, as if you’re hooking up with an image of the city that belongs to a deeply American, Chicagoan tradition which includes writers like Saul Bellow and Stuart Dybek. When you’re writing about the Windy City how often are you conscious of wrestling your image of it away from those writers who have come before, or are you wanting rather to engage with that literary conversation about it?

I think maybe all the places we tell ourselves we love are actually myths. Chicago is impossible for any one book or piece or prose or poem or whatever to capture. So is London. So is Cleveland. So is the state of Delaware and the country of India. And Madagascar. And yet I think this is why writers keep trying. And we keep trying in spite of - or maybe because of – the fact that we are conscious of the great writers who have come before. In my case, Bellow, Dybek, Chicago is the mythical place I grew up in. Call it Chicagoland, which is one of my favourite stupid advertising slogans. Aleksandar Hemon. We get a myth in our heads about a place and we try and convey this myth to a reader. So yes, for me, Chicago is the mythical place I grew up in. Call it Chicagoland, which is one of my favourite stupid advertising slogans. But Chicago is also a very real place where young kids are killed at the most alarming rate imaginable. I try and address how hopeless this feels in one scene in the book where Kat reads about a young girl being raped and then can’t figure out what to do about it. She feels so useless all she can do is go sit on the stoop. She’s paralyzed. She wants to act, to do something, but she doesn’t know what to do. She’s twenty-five years old and new to the city. What can she do? Raise her voice? March in the streets? Write a letter to Richie Daley? I relate to Kat’s hopelessness in that scene. You write a story about a myth, your myth, the myth you love, and then you open the Sun-Times and you fall apart. Does this make any sense? Writers, like most everyone else, see what’s wrong, but aren’t sure how to fix things. So we shed a little light maybe. But I reserve my most profound respect for those people who actually make change, and there are people in Chicago who devote their lives, every day, to making it safer place for kids.

The book is very frank and funny about the difficulties of adolescence, particularly the difficulty of talking to girls. Do you recall that period of time fondly or with a grimace?

Fondly, at least concerning those few times things worked out in this particular area. With a cringe concerning the majority of it. I’m only glib in my head, and on email.

The book itself is chock full of books, from Alexander’s reading lists at college to the Rozencrantz’s pointedly impressive library. Is this in some ways the story of how books can shape lives and how have they shaped yours?

Absolutely, Popper is, from the very first scene, obsessed with his own personal library. Or the idea of his library. Another thing we lug around.

Can you tell me what the seed for the story ‘At The Kitchen Table’ was?

In my old aborted life as a law student (I got the degree, my mother remains very proud), I worked down in North Carolina doing investigations on the conditions inside the North Carolina prison system. One huge issue is mental health. One day I got a call from a mother whose son had killed himself. I couldn’t do a thing to help her but listen, since as you can probably imagine, it’s not easy to sue the prison system for creating suicidal conditions. Again, an ineffectual response. I couldn’t help but, years later, write a story about it. ■

Image by Julian Civiero/Millenium Images.

Don DeLillo and Paul Auster have collectively featured in the pages of Granta ten times over a period spanning nearly three decades, including their recent appearences in Horror. Though they are friends, they had not read and discussed their work in public together for over twenty years before taking to the stage this week, at Barnes & Noble, Union Square, New York, for the main event of Granta’s Horror issue.

The below recording includes both Paul Auster’s reading from his piece of memoir ‘Your Birthday Has Come and Gone’, and Don DeLillo’s reading of sections from his story, ‘The Starveling’, followed by their discussion with Granta editor John Freeman, about their work in the issue, ‘impoverished characters’ and living in and writing about New York.

The Granta Podcast Episode 28 by Ted Hodgkinson Granta

The film below offers a glimpse of a recent conversation between Granta’s deputy editor Ellah Allfrey; two artists from the issue – Kanitta Meechubot and Dinos Chapman (whose drawing adorns the cover of Horror) – artistic director Michael Salu and the audience at The Hospital Club. This is followed by a piece by Michael on commissioning artwork for the issue.

Often, the most frightening thing is facing the other. In our Horror issue, this confrontation with the alien, the unknown, is presented in many forms, from the wraithlike moviegoer in Don DeLillo’s ‘The Starveling’, slinking in and out of a darkened matinee theatre, or a lovelorn tiger stalking through the suburbs in Rajesh Parameswaran’s ‘The Infamous Bengal Ming’. The stories in the issue left me wondering if the imagination is capable of conjuring absolute horror without personifying or falling prey to culturally imposed symbols.

From the Victoriana of Stoker and Poe to the pulpy aesthetics of H.R Giger and David Cronenberg we are all accustomed to the rich visual history of horror across the whole gamut of artistic expression. Giger is famed for representations of the body, peeling away the skin and recontextualising our biomechanical structure. Equally Cronenberg (a I wanted to find out what Horror can be today, in a time in which our moral boundaries shift continuously to accommodate political and economic change. director whose work I adore) certainly in the earlier part of his career, unflinchingly set out to examine human physicality, through violence, infection and transformation; a conversation about the ever-shifting shape of the human body. Whilst these works are always compelling, challenging and inspiring, they were also beautiful. In his Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful Edmund Burke makes a firm distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, arguing that the sublime induces a sense of being dwarfed or even horrified and beauty a sense of desire to preserve. I dreamed of an image for the cover that set out to achieve the impossible, conjoining both the beautiful and the sublime.

And so I asked the Chapman Brothers.

The Chapman Brothers’ vast body of work has long been an inspiration. Back since they created ‘Disasters of War’ I’ve been transfixed by their social and moral commentary, specifically their relentless engagement with challenging our system of context and identification over the last twenty years or so. I wanted to find out what horror can be today, in a time in which our moral boundaries shift continuously to accommodate political and economic change. With globally accessed news sites able to put you nose to nose with the scourged body of a fallen dictator, does ‘otherness’ become that more important to us?

The Chapmans’ answer to this question is beautifully succinct: an image that manages to be both everything and nothing at the same time. The delicate pencil work spawned a sprawling organic mass which is alien, yet familiar. The Horror I dreamed of: distilled.

Putting an issue of Granta Magazine together is akin to curating an exhibition space. The theme is reflected in both intricate textual Kanitta’s song is candid yet sensitive, a poetic comprehension of the incredible sophistication of the universe and where our mortality fits in to place. detail and visually embroidered, always considering the project as a whole. The iIllustrations and imagery we create and commission to introduce the stories have a broad remit. A visual response to the piece, yet an aesthetic responsibility to the wider concept. Oat Montien’s illustration of the animal desire which permeates Rajesh Parameswaran’s Bengal Ming, somehow sits well with the altogether more hauntingly symbolic representation by Golbanou Moghaddas of Will Self’s musing on his own mortality.

The inevitable by-product of this experiment, was the overwhelming presence of the body in this issue. Or at least organic or fleshy matter of some shape or form. Physicality, distinct from mind and spirit, seems to pervade every thought about ‘otherness’. That which is familiar to us, and which we indeed are, is also the most profound, frustrating and compelling of enigmas. Fear and desire – so intrinsically linked – and witnessed through the creation, compulsion and destruction of the body. Eros and Thanatos, unable to exist one without the other.

‘Our Lady of Pain’ from ‘A Garden of Illuminating Existence’ by Kanitta Meechubot in Granta 117: Horror.

A Garden of Illuminating Existence’, Thai-born Kanitta Meechubot’s multimedia meditation on grief, illness and death leads us further to the core of nature’s perpetual duality. As in much eastern philosophy, she embraces the cyclical journey of life, love, illness and death in a beautiful, spellbinding visual poem, amidst which she muses on the effect her grandmother’s battle with womb cancer had on her grandparents’ relationship and her own understandings of grief and love. Again, beauty abounds throughout this work. Kanitta’s song is candid yet sensitive, a poetic comprehension of the incredible sophistication of the universe and where our mortality fits in to place.

Illustration by Owen Freeman for ‘The Colonel’s Son’ by Roberto Bolaño in Granta 117: Horror.

Owen Freeman also enunciates love and desire, with his own distillation of Eros and Thanatos for the late Roberto Bolaño’s ‘The Colonel’s Son’. I was introduced to Freeman’s work years ago and have been captivated ever since by the visual narrative and his cinematic depictions of human behaviour. So much so that I’ve asked him to illustrate every Bolaño story that has appeared in Granta Magazine. You could say he’s the illustrator equivalent of the legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle. There was a natural fit between Freeman’s versatile, visceral focus on the body and Bolaño’s muscular and rather visual prose.

The Bolaño/Freeman collaboration led us to further explore the possibilities of narrating with imagery. ‘Ain’t Nothing but a Movie’ was the spawn of this happy union.

The project was pieced together by Jocabola and David Bonas in HTML5, the web language of today. The original score that The Bolaño/Freeman collaboration led us to further explore the possibilities of narrating with imagery. strains over Freeman’s images is by Sorgerune, a long term collaborator with Jocabola. Sorgerune asked me for music references I felt appropriate for the story. It needed to be unobtrusive, yet atmospheric and unnverving. I fired some names over: Murcof, Fever Ray, Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra, How to Dress Well. I wondered where he might take it. The end result is perfectly pitched.

The allegorical nature of Bolaño’s story, which follows a ‘zombie’ B-movie as seen late at night by the narrator, led us to think about societal metaphors of infection and revolution. Which in turn made audible whispers from a voice with much to say on these matters, the late Gil Scott-Heron:

As Wall Street goes, so goes the nation. And here’s a look at the closing numbers – racism’s up, human rights are down, peace is shaky, war items are hot – the House claims all ties. Jobs are down, money is scarce – and common sense is at an all-time low with heavy trading. Movies were looking better than ever and now no one is looking because, we’re starring in a ‘B’ movie. ■

Visit the Roberto Bolaño-inspired HTML5 experience Nothingbutamovie.com

Lyric excerpted from ‘B Movie’ from the album Reflections by Gil Scott Heron.

In Roberto Bolaño’s ‘The Colonel’s Son’ – published in Granta’s Horror issue – the narrator recounts a B-grade horror flick he sees on late night TV. A girl gets bitten by a zombie; the boy she loves tries to save her; the father of the boy, in turn, tries to save him. Bloodshed spreads across the city, as one by one witnesses become victims . . . and then killers . . .

Nothingbutamovie.com is an HTML5-based animation inspired by Bolaño’s piece, and has been brought to life by Granta illustrator Owen Freeman and the innovative web designers at Jocabola, who collaborated on Arcade Fire’s The Wilderness Downtown. Click here to start spreading the contagion.

Binyavanga Wainaina, a founding editor of Kwani? and author of the celebrated essay ‘How to Write About Africa’, reads from his long-awaited memoir One Day I Will Write About This Place and talks to Ellah Allfrey about meeting the expectations of an African readership and what to do with a bad review.

The Granta Podcast Episode 27 by Ted Hodgkinson Granta

A recording from the London launch of Granta 117: Horror on November 2, featuring readings from contributors Mark Doty and Will Self and their discussion with Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing about blood, the surprising relationship between Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman and the nature of addiction. The recording also features the questions and answers with the audience at Foyles bookshop.

The Granta Podcast Episode 26 by Ted Hodgkinson Granta

Robert Coover, the celebrated author of classics such as The Public Burning and A Night at the Movies, reads his story ‘Vampire’ and talks to Online Editor Ted Hodgkinson about distilling down an idea, the intersection of myth and the modern world and the quintessential English novel.

The Granta Podcast Episode 25 by Ted Hodgkinson Granta

Image courtesy of Declan Walsh.

The Granta Fortnightly Podcast: the following is a recording of an event at Khaas House, Islamabad, at which Granta contributor Declan Walsh read from his essay ‘Jihad Redux’ (pictured), which you can read in full in Granta 116: Ten Years Later and writer Cyril Almeida read from Tahar Ben Jelloun’s essay, ‘A Tale of Two Martyrs’, also in the issue.

The Granta Podcast Episode 23 by Ted Hodgkinson

In 2003, filmmaking duo Micah Garen and Marie-Hélène Carleton of Four Corners Media went to Iraq to make documentary about the looting of archaeological sites after the US invasion. While there they met Amir Doshi, author and teacher, who worked for them as an interpreter and guide through a landscape increasingly fraught with conflict. One day in August 2004, in the market place of Nasiriyah, Micah was unmasked as a foreigner by southern Iraqi militants and, together with Amir, taken hostage for ten days.

The following short film reunites Micah and Marie-Hélène with Amir, in the city of Erbil in July of 2011, and offers his perspective on a country recovering from trauma.

Guantánamo Bay: Lost Encounters and Images.

Seven-two-seven. You got mail!’ It took three or four years before Omar Deghayes heard those words. In that time he didn’t receive any post. Not even letters from his family. There were perhaps one or two, but after lawyers took up his case in 2005 he started to receive a lot more correspondence. In fact he started to get so many letters and cards that the guard who brought the post used to make a joke of it. ‘Oh, Omar,’ she would say with a smile, ‘you’re famous now.’

The first time I met Omar Deghayes while I was working on my book Guantánamo: If The Light Goes Out he was clearly still disorientated after nearly six years in Guantánamo.

On one visit Omar spoke of sitting in his Camp 5 isolation cell, looking at some of the hundreds – possibly thousands – of letters and cards he received from people he had never met. A few were from his family and his lawyer, but the majority came from people around the world who wished to register their concern for his situation.

He was never given the original documents. Everything was screened for dangerous substances, redacted, copied or scanned – including the backs of envelopes and blank sheets of paper – officially stamped and given a unique reference number.

Omar refused to follow the rules of his captors and was designated a non-compliant prisoner. His mail became part of the control process his interrogators exercised over him. When and if he received anything, whether in colour or black-and-white copies, was controlled by his interrogators.

According to Omar: ‘It was all part of the system of rewards for good behaviour that could earn you another blanket, or trousers, or a cup. The guards did not let us have cups as they were afraid that we would throw something in their faces. Behaviour even determined whether we were allowed to have toilet paper in our cells or had to ask for it from the guards, sheet by sheet, when we needed it.’

These letters came to have a double-edged effect for him. He received so many that it afforded a degree of protection from his guards who realized how much attention there was about his case. Yet the scale and the strangeness of some of the material contributed to his paranoia to the point where he believed his interrogators were planting material to further disorientate him.

They reveal the scale of the American military’s control process and the choices, poignant and bizarre, that individuals made in terms of pictures and words to send to a man they had never met in a cell thousands of miles away. The combination of this process and these choices creates a series of visually extraordinary documents that testify to the dilemma of a man alone in a cell, thinking of home.

Edmund Clark

These eighteen letters are from a selection of over sixty included in the book Guantánamo: If The Light Goes Out published by Dewi Lewis Publishing. As well as including the ‘Letter To Omar Series', this award-winning book explores three notions of home through photographs from the prison camps, the US Naval Base that is home to American community at Guantánamo, and the homes of ex-detainees in the UK and the Middle East.

Omar Deghayes

Libyan-born Omar Deghayes spent his childhood holidays learning English near Brighton with his family. Persistent harassment and the death of his father, a prominent trade unionist, lawyer and critic of the ruling regime, at the hands of the Libyan authorities forced them to seek asylum in the UK. Omar studied law at Wolverhampton University where he became a practising Muslim. After university he travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to experience Islamic cultures. In Afghanistan he worked with NGOs and local businesses, married an Afghan woman and started planning his own law practice. After the US-led invasion in 2002, he fled to Lahore, Pakistan, with his wife and son. It was from here that he was captured by armed men in Pakistani police uniforms and handed over to the US authorities who were offering large rewards for Arabs who had spent time in Afghanistan. Deghayes was taken first to the Bagram military base in Afghanistan and then to Guantánamo where he was incarcerated for six years. The British government requested his release in August 2007 and he returned, released without charge, in December that year. Deghayes now lives in England and has remarried. He works with the Guantánamo Justice Centre and Reprieve.

The Granta fortnightly Podcast: A.L. Kennedy, twice selected as one of Granta’s Best Young Novelists, talks to Editor John Freeman about her latest novel (The Blue Book), her favourite magic tricks and travelling by boat.

The Granta Podcast Episode 20 by Ted Hodgkinson

Yangon, in Myanmar, was once the most cosmopolitan of Southeast Asia’s cities. Now, it is practically forgotten. Under British rule in the 1920s and 30s, Yangon was the second busiest immigration port in the world, trailing only New York City. After World War II Great Britain pulled out, the economy faltered and a military dictatorship attempted to reassemble and unite the country. In a single century, Myanmar went from being the wealthiest country in Southeast Asia to one of the poorest in the world.

Over the last three years, as the state prepared to transition from a military dictatorship to a parliamentary system, they sold over 70 per cent of their assets – everything from ice factories to petrol stations. Through this wholesale offloading of resources and property, the junta hoped to secure control over the future economic development of Myanmar. The last spate of auctions, in February, saw roughly sixty of Yangon’s colonial-era apartment buildings on the auction block. These poorly-maintained, centrally-located and currently economically stagnant buildings will soon be torn down to make way for high-rise condominiums.

Yangon has the most intact colonial city centre in all of Southeast Asia, but money from the outside promises to alter Yangon’s historic skyline. This is why I have come to Yangon, because I know it may be my last chance to sit with this city – a city well beyond what those who built it would have ever imagined, a city no longer focused on hubris but on humility, not on progress but survival and quiet tenacity. ‘Still Lifes from a Vanishing City’ is an archive of sorts, an assemblage of the rich, full lives people built in the wreckage of an abandoned empire. In the upcoming decades we may find ourselves looking towards Yangon to gain insight into how we might live in a city that was built by an unsustainable system, and how those ‘less-than-fortunate’ people have made their lives out of what others have left behind.

Also on Granta Online:

Ali The Muscle: Johnny West reports from Lebanon on the ripple effects of the current uprising in Syria.

Granta Audio: Jamil Ahmad in conversation with Ellah Allfrey.

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

In Granta 112: Pakistan, Jamil Ahmad made his fiction debut with ‘The Sins of the Mother’. At seventy-eight, he has just published his first book, The Wandering Falcon. In it, Ahmad weaves together a series of interconnected short stories based on the Tribal Areas of Pakistan – the semi-autonomous tribal belt territories which run along Iran and Afghanistan’s borders – where he worked as a civil servant before retiring.

Granta Deputy Editor Ellah Allfrey joined Jamil Ahmad to talk about his new book and his working life, and about publishing after retirement.

To listen to the podcast, click on the player below or visit our iTunes page, where you can subscribe to make sure you receive every episode. To read Jamil Ahmad’s piece in Granta 112, click here to purchase an online subscription which allows you to read pieces published in Granta’s 115 back issues.

The Granta Podcast Episode 19 by yigarashi

Photo © Fauzia Minallah

Also on Granta Online:

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

‘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.

This week’s podcast is a recording of our final F Word launch event: readings and a discussion on women, feminism and power held at the University of East Anglia with the Writers’ Center Norwich. Joining Granta’s Deputy Editor Ellah Allfrey were Granta contributors Maja Hrgović, Urvashi Butalia and A.S. Byatt.

Below, you can hear Maja Hrgović reading from her short story ‘Zlatka’, Urvashi Butalia reading from her essay ‘Mona’s Story’– both of which feature in Granta 115 – and A.S. Byatt, reading an excerpt from her novel The Children’s Book. To see a video of A.S. Byatt reading at the event, click here.

To listen to the podcast, click on the player below or visit our iTunes page, where you can subscribe to make sure you receive every episode.

The Granta Podcast Episode 18 by yigarashi

Photographs courtesy of Writers’ Center Norwich

Also on The F Word Online:

‘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.

‘Worlds Literature Festival’: An exclusive reading by A.S. Byatt for the Norwich launch of The F Word.

Do writers of fiction have to create a cosmology in order to exist? How does the secular world challenge a fiction that is wrestling with questions of faith? For cultural atheists, what is it like to work and live in the US, the most religious country in the West? These are a few of the questions that Chris Adrian, Nathan Englander and Aleksandar Hemon will address tomorrow night at Shakespeare & Co for the ‘God in Fiction’ event in Paris. Following a reading from each of the authors, there will be a discussion on religion and atheism in fiction, with Granta editor John Freeman as moderator.

In the video below, Aleksandar Hemon and Stuart Dybek talk about what Chicago means to them. The video was made for Granta 108: Chicago, where Hemon’s memoir piece ‘If God Existed, He'd be a Solid Midfielder’ and Dybek’s ‘Seiche’ both appeared.

Photography by Velibor Bozovic

Also on The F Word Online:

‘The Bible made me a raging heathen feminist. Does that count?’: your unadaluterated Feminist Bibles.

‘Kill something larger than a squirrel at least once a day’, and other Notes for a Young Gentleman from Toby Litt.

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

Four months ago, peaceful protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square overthrew the regime of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. The country’s fate remains uncertain – the first open elections are several months away. What is clear is that the demonstrations have transformed the Middle East and the lives of Egyptians.

The following video profiles four women who participated in the revolution: a student, a cancer researcher, an art curator and a journalist advocate. They talk about how they came to join the protests; how they used online networks to mobilize people and spread information; and how the events in their country revolutionized their own attitudes as citizens.

Micah Garen and Marie-Helene Carleton of Four Corners Media are currently at work on a full-length documentary film, ‘If’, a coming-of-age story about young women and their experiences during the revolution.

Also on The F Word Online:

Interview: Paolo Zaninoni, editor of Granta Italia, ‘New Italian writers care a lot about manual work and class relations.’

You're a what kind of feminist? A Treatise on Political Philosophy at the Apex of American Empire, or a new poem by Megan Levad.

Domestic terrors: A dramatic reading of Lydia Davis’s ‘The Dreadful Mucamas’, from The F Word.

This week’s podcast is a dramatic reading of Lydia Davis’s short story ‘The Dreadful Mucamas’, featured in Granta 115: The F Word.

As part of our launch week events, Granta teamed up with Liars’ League. Here, ‘The Dreadful Mucamas’ is read by actress and voiceover artist Louisa Gummer. To listen to the podcast, click on the player below or visit our iTunes page, where you can subscribe to make sure you receive every episode.

The Granta Podcast Episode 17

(If the player does not display in your browser, click here.)

Also on The F Word Online:

Generations: Rebecca Swift on feminism in her family.

Yuka Igarashi interviews Taiye Selasi, whose fiction debut ‘The Sex Lives of African Girls’ is featured in Granta 115.

‘Accidents’: a new poem by Sadaf Halai.

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Granta 115: The F Word

In our latest Podcast, Sigrid Rausing, publisher of Granta, is joined by Rachel Cusk – one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, and Taiye Selasi, who makes her fiction debut in Granta 115: The F Word, to talk about which writers passed feminism down to them, and what the word means to them today. The three were in conversation for the launch of Granta 115 at Foyles bookshop.

To listen to the podcast, either click on the player below, or visit our iTunes page, where you can subscribe to make sure you receive every episode.

To read Rachel Cusk's and Taiye Selasi's stories, buy a copy of our ‘F- Word’ issue now.

The Granta Podcast Episode 16

(If your browser does not support this audio player, click here.)

Also on The F Word Online:

'The Allure of Love and Madness': Parisa Ebrahimi writes on Anne Sexton, Amy Nostbakken's The Big Smoke and the tradition of confessional poetry, and a short story, 'Suddenly', by Victoria Redel.

'But if you were born female, it was easy. You only had one decision to make: you were a good girl or you were a slut'. Leila Guerriero on growing up in Buenos Aires.

Page image by Adriane Clarke
Top Photo by Ellah Allfrey

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Subscribe to Granta magazine today.
Granta 115: The F Word
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‘Later, she sat me in front of a large mirror ...’

Em Cooper responds to Maja Hrgović’s ‘Zlatka’ in Granta 115: The F Word. To read the story, buy the issue now.

Or watch two other short films inspired by writing in the issue: ‘Aftermath’ by Rachel Cusk and ‘Night Thoughts’ by Helen Simpson.

‘Then by flame-light I see: I am burning/ his old easel’: read a new poem by National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Sharon Olds.

Also online: ‘Mona’s Story’, in which Urvashi Butalia shows us the world of the hijras, communities of transsexuals in India; and an interview with Urvashi Butalia.