Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals, published in the UK this month by Hamish Hamilton, is an uncompromising tour of ‘factory farming’ practices in America, and the sick-making lengths that some companies have gone to drive up profits and satisfy a gigantic market. (A preface to the UK edition states that a ‘remarkably similar story’ could be told about practices there though – British readers should not rest easy.) Online Editor Ollie Brock caught up with Foer on his London book tour, to find out about this surprising new vocation for a novelist.

OB: With two hugely successful novels under your belt, what made you turn to non-fiction?

JSF: I did it because I felt compelled to do it. I’m not the kind of writer who has books he wants to fill or novels he wants to write… I find it very difficult to stumble on a subject that’s interesting. So when something comes along, I don’t question too much whether I should be doing it. Eating Animals was a product of that same following of my instincts and my curiosity.

The discussion around modern farming practices is already quite well developed. What did you feel you were adding to the debate?

A couple of things really. To my knowledge there isn’t a book that just deals with the bullseye of the target. Eric Schlosser sort of touches on it in Fast Food Nation, Michael Pollan does it to a certain extent, but I don’t know if any book really gets the full scope of this. There has to be a sense in which writers always write the book they want to read… which implies that it hadn’t been written yet. This is the sort of book I wanted to read, wanted to have, regretted not having.

What do you mean by that?

Well there’s a lot of story-telling connected with this. It’s nostalgic, it reminds us of our families, it’s celebratory. We tell stories about what farming is, about what animals are… and the food production industry tells us stories about the where food comes from.

But you don’t feel that that’s any excuse, do you? You deconstruct the story-telling aspect as a ‘justification’ very effectively.

I don’t think it’s a very strong justification – I think it’s a justification we use. And that I use! Readily. For eating certain foods, and for doing other things… But sometimes the absence of those stories, or asking why we aren’t telling them, might be just as valuable. It might turn out that other stories bring us just as much happiness.

Your grandmother’s story of being a Holocaust survivor – for a long time living off scraps found on the ground; the chicken she was so proud to serve to her family – are very important to you. How has she reacted to your being vegetarian?

Well, she probably would prefer me to eat meat, but I don’t think she actually finds my vegetarianism puzzling at all. I was at her house not long ago, and I said to her, ‘Do you think animals feel pain?’ She gave me a look like I’d just asked her the dumbest question in the history of questions. And I had no idea what she was going to say. She said, ‘Of course they do!’ And of course they do! Would any reasonable person deny that? I think she respects the choice that I’ve made.

What was the singly worst practice you discovered in your research?

I think more shocking than any single instance was the rule. I mean, yes – I saw slaughter that wasn’t perfect; yes, I saw dead animals on farms; yes I saw animals that are so genetically modified – so bred – that they are physically incapable of walking. And that’s very sad, but I think to dwell on any instance is to ignore something much worse, which is, that this is it – this is our system. This is 99 percent or 93 percent of what’s available [in the US and UK respectively]. Animals as a rule are confined; as a rule, they are genetically modified. They are fed antibiotics, they have appendages removed without anaesthetic… Look, I’m not actually an animal lover! I’d be very surprised if I like animals any more than you do. I have no desire to pet a cow. I just think they should be treated like animals, that’s all – not like hunks of wood.

I do like animals, and I do pet a cow when I see one – but I also love eating them, and I think this goes for a lot of people. What is the reason for that contradiction, do you think? Why are we choosing to look the other way?

Well, my guess is that you just don’t think about it. It’s useful not to think about it, because it smells good and tastes good. And it’s what we ate yesterday, it’s what our parents ate. There’s an awful lot of inertia in our choices to eat meat. In fact, the ‘choice’ to eat meat really isn’t a choice. It’s the absence of a choice.

A lot of people are simply avoiding your book, for fear of becoming vegetarian, or for fear of too much guilt if they continue to look the other way. What does this say about our feelings on eating animals?

It’s just what people are like. It’s what I’m like! Life is just very complicated, and it’s difficult to be pulled in lots of different directions by persuasive humanitarian or ethical concerns. If I were to really think about it, is my time best spent giving an interview about my book, or should I devote my life to making sure there aren’t hungry people in my community? My only point is, we cannot remove any one of these ethical decisions from the context of our lives.

We just have loads of choices in front of us, and we try and make better ones. The whole conversation has been done a terrible disservice by the word ‘vegetarian’. People end up feeling like they can’t respond ultimately, hence the total rejection. But if you look at what it is we actually want, it’s a food production system that involves less destruction, less violence. Who would disagree with that?

But about the cause of that violence … You suggest in the book that the meat mass production business is what’s to blame. But you also write that ‘No one fired a pistol to start the race to the bottom. The earth just tilted and everyone slid into the hole.’ This refers to the economics of the situation, which you otherwise hardly talked about. Are the consumers or the corporations to blame? Or is it government regulations? Isn’t everyone just responding to a much larger, intractable system?

Well you can’t blame consumers for wanting to buy cheap products when they don’t know what those products are. Especially when the picture on the package is antithetical to the thing they’re actually buying. I think the government could do a much better job of regulating it, but so much of this happens out of sight. We still don’t know for sure what the effects of this are going to be. Women who drink factory-farmed milk are three times as likely to have twins as women who don’t; girls are going through puberty years earlier than they ever have before. Is there a direct link between the way we’re raising the animals and those facts? Probably, almost certainly – but we don’t know for sure.

What’s the outlook, though? You also suggest that a lot about this is inevitable. Do you think we’re just going to carry down the slippery slope?

There are reasons to be hopeful, there are reasons to be depressed. It’s depressing that people are eating more meat than ever before, and it’s depressing that China is slowly taking on the eating habits of America. It’s hopeful that 18 % of college students in America are vegetarian. And I imagine in five years or so, that those 18 % – a figure that’s growing every year – will become culture-makers, will become writers and journalists; they’ll become lawyers and politicians and nutritionists. The kind of people who are going to be guiding the conversation, I imagine, will be thinking about this quite differently.

You will have attracted a lot of activists to your cause. If you go back to writing fiction – which I hear you’re keen to do – will you be leaving them behind, a sort of Bob Dylan going electric?

Bob Dylan going Christian! Look, I’m not an activist. Despite appearances maybe, it’s not what I am and it’s not what I will be. There are going to be people who are much better than I am at pushing for necessary legislation, for pounding the pavements, for making sure that the conversation is sustained and broadened. I hope I contributed something to the mainstreaming of the conversation. At the end of the day, it’s a part of who I am, but it’s not who I am. And I can’t wait to get back to writing novels.

Jonathan Safran Foer was selected as one of Granta’s ‘Best of Young American Novelists’ issues, with his story ‘Room After Room’. Follow us on Twitter to be sure to hear about the competition to win a signed copy. You can also subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date with highlights of our online publication, news on the print magazine and events.

This interview was first run with a competition to win signed copies of Jess Row’s limited-edition short story collection, ‘The True Catastrophe’. The competition is now closed, but you can follow us on Twitter to make sure you hear about more of these.

Granta’s online editor Ollie Brock interviewed Jess Row about his writing, featuring in a ‘Best of Young Novelists’ collection, and his homegrown publishing project. He says that the real value of the short story has ‘barely begun to be explored by writers and critics’...

OB: You were named one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists in 2007, along with Jonathan Safran Foer, Yiyun Li and Gary Shteyngart. Where were you in your writing career at the time, and how did this affect it?

JR: My first book, The Train to Lo Wu, came out in 2005 – so by the time the Granta award came around I was immersed in a new collection of stories (a few of which appear in The True Catastrophe) and a novel. Those projects are still under way. The award itself was just a wonderful honour. I was especially proud to be among such a varied cadre of writers whose work is both American and – an overused word – ‘global’ in spirit.

I’ve noticed quite a dark, violent streak running through your work. The story featured in Granta’s 2007 ‘Best of Young American Novelists’ describes a college-student-turned-jihadi; one of the stories in your new collection The True Catastrophe is about two girls killed in a lift shaft, and a death in 9/11; another tells of a horrific conceptual art stunt that reminded me of Teddy Giles in Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved. Do you mind my asking what is behind these preoccupations?

I think what I’m most drawn to in writing about this subject is the way in which very small, intimate acts of violence (not even necessarily physical violence) often serve as a microcosm or incubator for the massive, cataclysmic violence we see all around us in the world. All of the stories you mention have to do with characters who seek out that connection or who feel it forming inside them in some way.

The story collection is from your very own Suture Press: beautifully bound books in uncoated paper covers, with elegant typefaces, produced in strictly limited numbers. Can you tell me a little about this new project?

In the last few years I’ve been going to the Bookfair at the Associated Writing Programs conference and seeing waves and waves of new small presses appearing. Many of them are producing books – or book-like objects – that look and feel ‘handmade’, whether they’re letter-pressed, stamped, hand-numbered (as ours are) or what have you. And I've been really inspired by this return to a more intimate and idiosyncratic way of publishing and distributing literature. When I was in high school and involved in the underground/hardcore/punk music scene, most of what I read and listened to was produced in this way, so in a way the value of independence – the ‘DIY’ ethic – was inculcated in me from an early age. Add to that that my wife and co-editor, Sonya Posmentier, has had a long-term interest in book arts and bookmaking, and you have Suture Press. I chose the word ‘Suture’ because it comes from an Indo-European root that means both ‘to sew or bind’ and (in Sanskrit) ‘a book’, i.e. a ‘sutra’, like the Yoga Sutra or the Kama Sutra.

The particular project that we're starting with this chapbook, the New Series, is a series of chapbooks that simply celebrates the diversity of the contemporary American short story. I wanted to create something that readers can collect and cherish, and that preserves an intimate feeling of literally coming from the hands of the author.

You seem to favour the short story as a form. García Márquez said that writing each short story is just as hard as writing a novel – do you agree? Do you think it could be the most appropriate form in our time-starved, information-soaked era?

I think it could be the most appropriate form, and I wish it was, but honestly I don’t think that the short story will ever attract as many readers as the novel. The novel is an immersive form, and I think many readers turn to literature for that sense of immersion, taking comfort in an alternate universe that lasts for a while. (This, I think, explains the lasting popularity of nineteenth-century novels in particular). Of course, the short story does have a devoted and loyal readership – it’s just a rather small one. And mainstream publishers have always had a difficult time reaching that audience in a sustainable, economical way. Perhaps this is changing with the advent of electronic publishing – who knows?

One problem, as I see it, is that the short story isn’t taken very seriously as an art form in its own right. We don’t honour the short story’s distinctiveness as, say, the string quartet is honoured as distinct from the symphony, or drawing is as distinct from painting. Regarding what García Márquez says – it may be true, in some cases, but I don’t think that it's profitable always to compare stories to novels. The values the short story embraces – economy, brevity or ‘quickness’, compression, miniaturization, density, stasis – have barely begun to be explored by writers and critics. Perhaps if the short story were appreciated on its own terms, it would have more cultural cachet and thus a wider audience.

An extract of Jim Crace’s novel, All That Follows, appeared in our latest issue, Granta 109. The novel will be published in April – by Picador in the UK and Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in the USA. It will also be published in Italy by Guanda, and by Aleph in Spain. You can buy a copy of Granta 109 here.

Click inside the window to watch this interview with Ellah Allfrey, in which Jim Crace discusses the novel, and his method of writing more generally. He reveals that rather than beginning with a setting or character, he starts with an idea, or a question he wants answered: ‘I just wade in and see what happens.’ In All That Follows, this idea was ‘political timidity’ and the question was whether ‘timid bourgeois liberalism’ is preferable to violent political action.

He also explains why he will only be writing one more book, a novel about consciousness, which will be his ‘most ecstatic, most poetic yet’.

Click here to see a full list of our exclusive interviews, with writers including Peter Carey, Daniel Alarcón and Paul Auster, and the musician Natalie Merchant.

Natalie Merchant is a singer and musician from New York, whose music has been praised for its lyrical, imagistic qualities – she incorporates the work of poets, both well-known and obscure, into her work. After a twelve-year spell with the band 10,000 Maniacs, Merchant launched her solo career – from which she has recently taken a long absence after the birth of her first child, a daughter.

Her album ‘Leave Your Sleep’ will be released by Nonesuch Records this spring (its title is taken from a Mother Goose rhyme). She calls it ‘the most elaborate project I have ever completed or even imagined’: it touches on Cajun music, bluegrass, reggae, chamber music, folk and jazz, as well as folk styles from around the world. She has also used the work of e. e. cummings, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Lear and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

When in London last month, Natalie gave an exclusive interview with Granta’s deputy editor Ellah Allfrey. Click below to watch her speak about her favourite poets, children’s ‘emergence into the world of language’ and their first glimpses of mortality.

Click here for more content exclusive to granta.com, including video interviews, fiction, memoir and reportage.

Brad Watson’s story ‘Vacuum’ is published exclusively in Granta 109: Work. It will also appear in Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives, to be published this year by W. W. Norton. Three boys - known to us only as the ‘oldest brother’, ‘middle brother’ and ‘youngest brother’ - try to watch a western, obstructed by their mother vacuuming in front of the television. ‘The boys really wanted to see what was going to happen in the western show, but now they had missed it because they had been watching their mother make faces and then yell that one day she would walk out of the house and never come back.’ They try to solicit help from a maid their father had fired; the neighbour Dr Hornegay arrives, besuited and carrying whiskey. The boys decide to entertain themselves with some experimental outdoor stunts. Granta’s Patrick Ryan interviewed the author about the story’s inception, the role of the middle brother, and the strains on mothers as they started going out to work, with task of keeping a household together undiminished.

PR: In ‘Vacuum’, the middle brother emerges into a place of prominence by the end. He’s the one we learn the most about, internally, and the one who is the most changed. Did you know this (his prominence) was going to happen all along, or is it something you discovered as you drafted the story?

BW: Well, although it’s unusual for this to happen for me (I hear a lot of other writers claim it) this story did emerge from the single image of the mother, angry, vacuuming while her three boys watched television, a little dumbfounded and afraid. That’s a memory from my childhood that’s always stuck with me, and I always wanted to get a story from it. So, given that it’s my memory, and I was the one affected by it enough never to forget it, I guess it was inevitable the middle brother (I was a middle brother) would become central. That said, I want to add that after the image of the mother vacuuming, the story is entirely fictional except for the emotional content of the middle brother’s experience (and the razor blade incident – that really happened). My parents were not like those parents, and the supporting characters are fictional.

Related to that, how different is the finished story from the one you first envisioned?

Again, I normally do have something of a vision or idea of what a story will be (even if that changes in the course of writing) before I write it, but in this case I really didn’t: only the opening image and a strong sense of the emotional context for it, and the need to work toward some way of ‘resolving’ (for lack of a better word at the moment) that.

Can you explain why you chose to leave all the family members in the story unnamed? What did this provide you with as the writer, and/or what do you think it provides us with as readers? For all the anonymity this tactic might produce, the story feels almost wincingly intimate.

I’m not sure. I wrote the first paragraph, with that image of the vacuuming and the anger, quickly, in longhand in my notebook. After a long time of wanting to write a story from that image, this paragraph suddenly came out. It may have seemed right to say ‘the mother’ and ‘the boys’ because that was so strongly the picture I had in mind: in black-and-white, initially from a diffuse or omniscient perspective. It’s possible that I instinctively entered the story with a somewhat archetypal sense of its sources. Given that the impulse seems to have been largely emotional, this possibly makes sense. It seemed natural, also, to give names to the supporting characters, as if (as you suggest) naming them removes them some elemental distance from the central emotional content or development in the story.

The ending is so perfectly fitted to the rest of the story, and yet it is entirely unexpected. Were there other options you explored before settling on this one?

I can’t remember that there were, and I can’t find a draft any earlier than the one that ends the way it does now. I’ve also misplaced the handwritten first paragraph, and don’t recall if I wrote the entire first draft in longhand (but I don’t believe I did). So, although this is also unusual for me, it seems to have come out that way without tinkering or any substantial reconsideration. I guess that, once I got hold of the voice and my sense of the emotional evolution in the story, it was pretty firm. Again, that moment isn’t one that ever happened in my life, but I have a strong image of that particular kitchen and dining table and lamp, etc. In my memory, one or both parents are always at that table, too, with us boys. So the fact that the boys are alone says something about what’s at the heart of this story, I suppose.

‘Vacuum’ is the only piece in the Work issue that recognizes housework as an honourable (yet often thankless) form of labour. What is it about housework that makes it so invisible?

I know a few people who enjoy it, but not many. And for mothers of that era, between the 1950s and the 1970s, who were taking on jobs outside the home yet still expected to do most (if not all) the housework and cooking, too, it was especially difficult and probably began to seem degrading – in the sense that although it had fallen to a position of lesser status within the household, subjugated in importance to secondary bread-winning, it still had to be done and was expected to be done by the woman. That is, it became increasingly hard to get it done, but everyone (including those women, I think, in most cases) still assumed it would be done and with the same degree of diligence and by the person who’d always done it: the housewife/mother. Rushing home from work to face a pack of hungry children like fledglings squawking with open beaks takes all the joy out of cooking, too; it’s the polar opposite of Julia Childs’ world.

The society and individuals, alike and together, were complicit in allowing this gap between a tradition and a new reality to exist. I don’t imagine that there aren’t lots of people who never left the gap, you know, like defeated soldiers holding out in caves, for whom the war has never ended.

And, let’s face it. If you have to work a job outside the home, why should you like or want to spend your time off dusting, scrubbing toilets and floors, and pushing around an appliance as strange and loud and tyrannical as a vacuum cleaner? And why should any child, to be fair, view housework as anything but another sentenced element in the long incarceration of childhood?

Orhan Pamuk speaks to Granta editor John Freeman about his latest book, The Museum of Innocence. Orhan Pamuk has been published four times in Granta.

Granta editor John Freeman interviews the author about book piracy in Peru - the subject of Daniel Alarcón’s piece in Granta 109: Work.

Granta’s Deputy Editor Ellah Allfrey interviewed author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o at New Beacon Books about his childhood in rural Kenya and his piece in the new Granta - an extract of upcoming memoir Dreams in a Time of War.

Granta’s new issue, on the theme of ‘Work’, is launched this week. See here for details of the launch party, at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon this Wednesday.

Granta 106, the New Fiction Special, includes ‘Invisible’, an extract from Paul Auster’s novel of the same name, recently published by Faber in the UK and Frances Coady in the US. Auster is an internationally acclaimed author of more than twenty books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He is also a frequent Granta contributor – ‘Invisible’ marks the eighth appearance of his work in the magazine.

Joanna Briscoe lauded Invisible’s ‘intensely felt authenticity’ in the Guardian, calling it ‘a fascinating and highly accomplished’ work. In the New York Times, Clancy Martin wrote that Auster’s prose is ‘contemporary American writing at its best: crisp, elegant, brisk, [with] the illusion of effortlessness that comes only with fierce discipline... [If] part of why you read is the great pleasure of falling in love with a novel, then read Invisible.’

In May, Auster spoke about Invisible with Granta Editor John Freeman. In this exclusive video interview, Auster addresses the emotional intimacy and intertextual exercises of his fiction, the ‘intensity of youth’, the unsettling quality of narrative clarity and his writing process.

In this interview with Granta.com, Maria Venegas discusses ‘Bullet Proof Vest’, her essay from Granta 108: ‘Chicago’ about her criminal father, who ‘shot a man when he was twelve years old’ and with whom she has recently reconnected after an absence of sixteen years. She also explains the ‘key to writing good non-fiction’ and her sense of Chicago.

Purchase your copy of Granta 108: ‘Chicago’

Find out more about ‘Chicago’

In this interview with Granta.com, the award-winning novelist Dinaw Mengestu talks about how he came to write ‘Big Money’, his contribution to Granta 108, his forthcoming novel, How to Read the Air, his relationship with his hometown, Chicago, a ‘ city layered with complexity’, and his inspiration as a writer.

Purchase your copy of Granta 108: ‘Chicago’

Find out more about ‘Chicago’

Read Dinaw Mengestu’s essay on the 2008 American election, written exclusively for Granta.com

In this exclusive interview, Peter Carey, the two-time Booker Prize-winning novelist, talks to Granta editor John Freeman about the origins and inspiration for his forthcoming novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, an excerpt of which appears in Granta 108: ‘Chicago’, Alexis de Tocqueville and the ‘ongoing argument of American democracy’ and the pleasures and perils of writing fiction.

At four o’clock in the morning, when Louis de Bernières has lines of poetry repeating in his head which won’t stop gnawing away, he writes them down. ‘I think of poetry as my original vocation,’ he tells me. ‘Novel writing somehow grew out of it.’ De Bernières did not become a published writer until he was thirty-five, but, he declares: ‘I always knew I was going to be a writer from a very early age, the way someone knows they are going to a doctor or a priest.’ Since being named a Granta Best of Young British Novelist in 1993, de Bernières’s books have included the bestselling Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994) and Birds Without Wings (2004), his sixth novel and the one he is most proud of. A new short story collection, Notwithstanding: Stories of Village Life, will be published in October by Harvill Secker.

At the Oxfam Bookfest, an inaugural literary festival launched to celebrate the fact that Oxfam, England’s largest retailer of secondhand books, has through booksales raised millions of pounds to help fight poverty, I interviewed de Bernières and he gave an enchanting reading of his poetry – he is preparing three poetry collections for publication, as he returns to that original vocation.

‘I don’t want to be cool and metropolitan and cynical,’ he declares. ‘I want to express my feelings and hope that the reader feels those feelings too.’ He admires poetry that comes from a state of high emotion, such as the war poetry of Wilfred Owen. Until he was around thirty-five, he only read Latin Americans novelists. ‘My contemporaries were all reading Martin Amis, which is what I characterize as that cool metropolitan style of writing; people often just being nasty to each other.’ De Bernières applies the rules of poetry to prose, suffusing his novels with a deliberate lyricism, such as Pelagia lamenting her father’s death in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and the passage at the end of Birds Without Wings mourning things that have passed away.

Poetry runs in the family – his father would quote passages of Shakespeare at the dinner table and wrote his own ‘old-fashioned but good’ poetry in the style of Georgian poets, until ‘his whole life was pushed off course’ when the war broke out. His mother’s greatest love was the work of Rupert Brooke. Once upon a time, however, young Louis was on track for a military career. When Louis was fifteen, his father couldn’t afford the fees of his Berkshire public school and suggested his son apply instead for an army scholarship. ‘But by the time I was eighteen I just wanted to be Bob Dylan. This was when youngsters were growing their hair long, falling in love at rock festivals. I no longer had the right personality to be a soldier. I wanted to play the guitar. I didn’t want to be told what to do by anyone. I didn’t want to tell anyone what to do. At that time I thought I was a pacifist. Now I want to kill everybody. There are lots of people I’d like to see strung up on lampposts.’ He managed only a few months in the army, before a sergeant major advised him: ‘What we do is break people down and rebuild them. It’s like hypnotism; it only works on people who want it, but we haven’t been able to break you down or change you because that’s not what you want so I think it’s better if you go.’ This caused huge familial difficulties as he was expected to go into his father’s regiment and his parents were ‘very upset and even ashamed’. He then worked for about six months as a stone mason living at home, but ‘in the end it became unbearable’.

Aged nineteen, he escaped to Colombia. ‘When I came back I didn’t feel British again for absolutely years.’ Advice from some fabulous English teachers has also shaped the wide, global scope of his fictional settings, with one teacher telling him: ‘You must never, ever think that the only good writers are writing in English. You can’t be literate if you haven’t read Tolstoy or Balzac.’ This international outlook is deepened by de Bernières’s own heritage: ‘Being of French origin makes a difference,’ he muses. ‘It makes you feel almost as if you have a right to be anywhere. After I spent a year in Colombia living in the middle of nowhere, I did feel as if I could be from anywhere. One of the great pains of my life is that I can’t be everywhere. You have to live somewhere.’ But when he is writing, does he imaginatively inhabit these other worlds? ‘Imaginatively, I mostly live in Greece and Turkey. My car and body are in East Anglia. But my head is in Anatolia.’

After the globe-trotting of his previous works, his fascinating new book, Notwithstanding: Stories of Village Life, sees a return to settings much closer to home; a compelling collection of stories based on what he remembers of growing up in a village in the South of England. ‘It came about because I had failed to see my country in a proper way,’ he explains. The stories were inspired during a visit to the South of France where he met a gentleman who provided insight into England. ‘He said to me, “I love England!” And I said “why?” and he said “because it’s so exotic” and I said “come on, what on earth do you mean?” And he said “well, I go to France or Belgium or Germany or Holland, and to me they all seem the same but when I go to England it is a huge lunatic asylum.” When I thought about this, I realised he was right.’

De Bernières enumerates anecdotes of some of the lunacy: in the village where he grew up there was an old lady who spent her retirement dressed as a man shooting squirrels. There was another lady next door whose house was a ‘stinking menagerie’, and who drove a car dating back to 1927 with the dashboard hanging off and ‘always had a goat loose on the backseat’. Yet another neighbour stayed in the bath for two days once, just topping it up with hot water. There was a spiritualist convinced she could see the ghost of their husband, would go for walks with him and once paid two fares on the bus. Thus, de Bernières realised what an ‘extraordinarily mad place’ England was, indeed quite like something from a Marquez novel. Although he draws at times on people that he knew, he stresses ‘the most dangerous thing that can happen to a novelist is that you get too addicted to the truth. After a while [the characters] take on their own life anyway and start dictating to you what they can and can’t do. That’s happened to me over and over again’.

‘If you separate off cultures in a society the culture seems to disintegrate. One of the things I love about Greece is that everybody has the same culture. Little children can dance with their grandfather. In this country it’s fragmented. All over the continent right down into Turkey you have the evening walk which everyone goes on. I think we’ve lost the plot in England; children don’t learn folk dances; they don’t learn traditional songs; they don’t learn the old customs; we’re losing our regional dialects. It’s all very depressing. It’s all so diluted.’

‘One of the odd things about being British,’ muses de Bernières, ‘is that you are not allowed to be really good at more than one thing. So a novelist who writes really good poetry like Kingsley Amis isn’t going to get remembered for the poetry. In my case, I’m also a musician but I know I won’t be remembered for that.’

De Bernières has just been playing in Ireland with his band The Antonius Players. What, I wonder, is the relationship between his twin passions for poetry and music? ‘One of the reasons I stopped writing poetry for a long time was that I no longer knew what a poem was,’ he explains. ‘There was once a time when we all knew what a poem was and could tell whether it was good or bad in two ways, whether it was technically good, and whether it made any kind of impact on you. But then at the beginning of the twentieth century the standards started to change. People like T.S. Eliot made it much more confusing and we didn’t know what a poem was. Since I’ve been working as a professional musician I’ve thought the English idea of stress might be just too damn simple. In music you get brevs, minutes, crotchets, quavers, hemi-demi quavers, etc. I feel poetry ought to aspire to that sort of sophistication when it comes to metre. Wouldn’t it be nice to write poetry the way a musician writes music? I aspire to that.’ Music is very physical but also very stressful, he says, so sometimes his right hand clenches so tightly that it’s really very painful but he keeps playing, all the way through.

After a hiatus, mainly due to a crisis of confidence, the poetical inspiration has returned to de Bernières: ‘I’ve been writing a lot of poems as I’ve been having the most terrible time domestically. One of the strange beneficial side effects was that tonnes of poetry came out that had nothing to do with my domestic crisis at all.’

Three separate poetry collections are ready for publication, grouped around the themes of ‘love and sex, general purpose poems, and those in honour of Constantine Cavafy’, the Greek Alexandrian poet with whom de Bernières shares a fascination with the Ancient Hellenic world.

De Bernières reads poems both poignant and comic, about a ‘night time heavy with…promise’; about lovers who ‘ignored the sea and stars’; about wandering through a graveyard and seeing the words ‘love is stronger than death’ (’the cynical agnostic that I am thought, “if only that were true”’; a humorous poem about a fierce dog; another about an ex-girlfriend in Ipswich (a place he associates with heartbreak, and the most stressful job he ever had working in a school). His versatility as a writer – and reader - juxtaposing wry insights with longer, mournful reflections never fails to surprise and delight the audience.

He becomes philosophical when musing on how far he has come since the Granta Best of Young British Novelist nomination in 1993, and on getting older. ‘I’m middle-aged now. When you get older you develop a complex that younger people don’t see you as an equal. It’s a throwback to my generation because that’s how we thought of our parents; they were just a bunch of old boring fascists who didn’t know anything. Of course it isn’t until they get till their eighties [that] you see them as an irreplaceable archive’. The best thing about the Granta nomination was that he got to know writers of his generation, some with whom he has remained permanent friends. ‘I couldn’t live without Esther [Freud] even though I hardly ever see her’. As for his work: ‘I sometimes have this horrible fear that because Birds Without Wings was the best thing I’ll ever do in a sense my career is over, as I don’t think I can do anything better. So why not write poetry? Why not go and play concerts instead?’

However, he affirms: ‘I know I’ve got two or three novels left in me yet. I want to write a book based on the life of my great-grandfather, who was condemned to wander all his life because his wife wouldn’t divorce him because she was so religious. So he never could start again. He ended up in a tiny green shack in the rocky mountains. But it needs a plot.’

He also wants to write a book about a charismatic eco-fascist who thinks we should all go back to nature. ‘ If there’s one thing humans aren’t suited to it’s going back to nature. It would be my version of Lord of the Flies. I thought of setting it in East Anglia because that’s where I live. At the time I want to set the novel, Norwich was full of lunatics.’

Louis de Bernières’s eschewal for rules, evident in his disdain for the army, also emerges in his writing habits, often writing what he wants, when he wants. These days, however, he is more disciplined. ‘There was a time when I would wait for inspiration but then I found that if I sat down and worked, the inspiration came anyway.’ He finds it important to maintain activities aside from the writing: ‘I do a lot of gardening, carpentry, and throwing children around a lot is a great hobby. I always felt that if you live too much in your own head you go mad and disconnected. It’s very important to stay connected with the earth and with things and with people.’

In this Granta.com podcast, Rana Dasgupta and Ruchir Joshi discuss Delhi’s super rich, the language of global capitalism and the energy unleashed by new money.

Dasgupta’s essay, ‘Capital Gains’, on the intersection of money, power and political influence in today’s Delhi, was published in Granta 107. Joshi, who contributed a memoir, ‘Tracing Puppa’, to Granta 104: ‘Fathers’, is working on a piece for the magazine’s ‘Work’ issue, to be published later this year. This forthcoming essay will examine the changing professional lives of India’s lower and middle classes. You can watch a Granta.com interview with him here.

Eleanor Catton, author of the critically acclaimed, Betty Trask-award-winning debut novel, The Rehearsal, talks to Granta.com. Catton received the 2007 Adam Award for The Rehearsal and won New Zealand’s Sunday Star-Times Short Story Competition. She is currently on a Fellowship at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Catton’s short story, ‘Two Tides’, appears in Granta 106: Fiction Special. You can read the first chapter of The Rehearsal here.

In this video interview, Catton talks about how The Rehearsal came about, the creative challenges of the short story, the usefulness of creative writing classes and her current projects.

Ha Jin’s short story, ‘In the Crossfire’, appears in the current issue of Granta. Ha Jin was born in Liaoning, China, in 1956, and moved to America in 1984. He is a professor of English at Boston University and is currently working on a novel about an American missionary, set in China in the 1930s.

The following Q&A took place over email.

Helen Gordon: ‘In the Crossfire’ is taken from your forthcoming book, A Good Fall? Had you always intended these stories to form a collection?

Ha Jin: Yes, I conceived the stories as a collection from the very beginning. They are all set in Flushing, NY, and are about the immigrant life. That gives them a kind of unity.

Can you say where the idea for this particular story originated?

I read on a website some complaints written by women about their mothers-in-law, so I wondered about how a husband would respond to those situations. That is how I began to think about the story.

Are there any other writers who have had a significant influence on your short fiction?

When I write short stories, I often read Chekhov, who is an inspiration.

And do you see your work as influenced by a distinct Chinese literary heritage?

Conventional Chinese fiction is different from the kind of literary fiction we write today, so in this case I cannot say I was influenced directly by Chinese literature.

I wondered whether your books were widely translated and published within China? Is that possible given the current political climate?

Only Waiting [Ha Jin’s second novel, published in the US in 1999] was published in China and then went out of print. All the other books are banned. But all my fiction books have been translated into Chinese and published in Taiwan. The readers in the Chinese diaspora can read them.

And if you were to begin the process of writing fiction today, would you still write in English?

My reason for writing in English is twofold: to separate my existence from the state power of China and to preserve the integrity of my work. Given the present political situation, I have to continue writing in English. In fact, after working so long in this language, it has become part of my existence.

Have you formulated any rules or guidelines for presenting a foreign language - Mandarin, say - in English? I’m thinking, for example, of Meifen’s dialogue in ‘In the Crossfire’...

It is always ad hoc. For me, the most important of all is to have a sense of the English ear: how much it can receive a foreign language presented in English. In general, if a character speaks Mandarin or another foreign language, the speech should not be too standard in English, but then how much can it be stretched and even distorted? That has to be decided case by case.

In The Writer as Migrant, your recent collection of essays, you point out that the punning of Nabakov’s Pnin is ‘unique to a non-native speaker who…is easily amazed by the most common features of his adoptive language’. Is this sense of amazement something that you feel as a writer? Are there any advantages to writing in an adopted language?

Sometime this does happen. Why do ‘a slim chance’ and ‘a fat chance’ basically mean the same thing? But on the whole, there are many more disadvantages than advantages. The biggest advantage for me is to be alone, working in an individual space.

At the end of May, Granta magazine announced the appointment of its American editor John Freeman to the role of acting editor. Freeman came to Granta after six years on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and has been with the magazine since December 2008. During that time he edited work by Ha Jin, Paul Auster, Wislawa Szymborska and Joseph O’Neill. He has also spent the past six months hosting twenty-five Granta events around the United States and Canada. Granta.com’s Roy Robins recently caught up with Freeman to talk about his background, his inspirations and future issues of Granta.

Can you tell me a little about yourself? What’s your background?

I was born in Ohio, delivered newspapers for ten years growing up in California, and spent most of my adult life writing for them. My sleep patterns have never really recovered. During the time I worked with the National Book Critics Circle, we tried to raise awareness about the cutbacks in newspaper book review sections. The consequences of this industry’s self-knee-capping can be seen now in the US. Book sales are way down. Newspapers served a function in the cultural life of America which has yet to be replaced, and may never be recreated. This worries me.

What excites you most about Granta?

The chance to publish the world’s best writers. Reading the magazine over the past fifteen years has introduced me to so many essential voices, like Ryszard Kapuściński, Arundhati Roy, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Geoff Dyer, Daniel Alarcón. It also made me realize that travel and memoir and reportage can be every bit as artful as a good short story.

The chance to do this now is also a great privilege. I don’t believe there’s a lack of good writing in our world, but rather a shrinking number of places where it can be published imaginatively, to a wide audience willing to submit themselves to the pleasures and guidance of serious literature, of what it can show them and where it can take them. As an international literary magazine, Granta is in a unique position to tell readers important stories, to make people think. It’s what our readers expect of us.

How do you think Granta can be improved?

Culturally, financially, and metaphorically, we don’t live in an Anglo-American world anymore, but even the best magazines – Granta included – do not fully reflect this. Look at the last ten years of Booker Prize winners and finalists. Our culture has become dangerously detached from the world at large. We need to do a better job of finding writers outside of the English language, from all parts of the world – but especially the Middle East, Africa, and Asia – and call on them to tell stories, rather than sending someone from the Anglo-American world to ferry back the news.

In what direction will you take Granta as Acting Editor?

We need to be bolder, stop being so respectable, and take more risks – stylistically, and thematically. We’re not a magazine, really, but a cultural space where anything can happen. That’s Granta’s heritage. James Fenton and Bruce Chatwin and Kapuściński broke the moulds of their form, and made something exciting happen on the page. Finally, I think we need to be less fearful about being political. It’s not that I think Granta should be a current events magazine, far from it: but the attempt to excise politics from certain stories is a kind of political statement. Reading is a moral endeavor and we need to treat it like one.

How does Granta differ from its competitors?

In almost every way conceivable. Unlike The New Yorker, we’re not dependent on ads and we don’t cover current events. We have no space constraints; our next issue features a 16,000-word memoir by Mary Gaitskill, which is a tour de force, a kind of nonfiction novella. Unlike the Paris Review, we don’t have the pressures of non-profit status and unlike McSweeney’s we have the resource to pay our writers well. It’s a lucky position. But we need to justify that beneficence with every issue.

You said in a recent interview that you’d like to ‘reconnect with the vibrancy of American writing’.

Because America is a country of immigrants, the prose created by its writers reflects a blizzard of cultural influences, stylistic tics, and the personality of many, many languages. I think that’s reflected in the energy of the American novel, the antsy, near-constant production of short stories. And now that the US has a black president, it’s about time we admit there is no so-called centre anymore. Everyone is working a margin, which is a much better place to work artistically. It’s sort of thrilling that recent Pulitzer winners in America have included a near-recluse Melvillean like Cormac McCarthy and a pyrotechnical Dominican refracting the American dream through an imagination fed by science fiction, such as Junot Díaz. This isn’t to say that Richard Ford or Marilynne Robinson aren’t great writers as well, because they are white and realists; we can just stop pretending that they speak for the whole country – like all novelists, they’re simply chronicling the inner life of their characters.

How does Granta adapt in an age when magazines are threatened by the internet, the economy and dwindling subscription numbers?

We need to expand how we define what it means to publish great writing. This means reaching readers in the way that they want to hear from us. Such as having a print edition for people who treasure the beauty of text and the photo essays on the page; having a dynamic website for those who want to read us online; having a Kindle or iPhone-compatible edition for people who want to read stories in the palm of their hand; sending out links by twitter to readers who want to know the moment new stories appear; hosting events and conversations and parties for people who want to interact with the magazine in person. The challenge is to make sure that none of these respective endeavors cheapens or reduces the complexity and integrity of the work we publish.

Will Granta continue to be themed?

Yes, absolutely. There are so many topics we have yet to cover, and I believe themes are a great way to group an unlikely and surprising bunch of writers in one issue, to create the cognitive friction of juxtaposition. To focus on important issues. Our next theme is Chicago – which will feature writers from Don DeLillo to Hisham Matar to Aleksandar Hemon, capturing the city’s energy, its history, the elemental, visceral forces of it, and the writers who have emerged from there. Other upcoming themes cover two of the most important things in all our lives: work and sex.

Every now and then, though, we’ll have no theme, which will give us a chance to mix things up.

How do you judge good writing and what writing excites you most?

I think you know right away if a piece of writing is good. Does it move me? Does it have intensity? Is it beautiful? Does it have anything important to say? Could anybody but the writer have produced it? That’s a start. There are too many contemporary writers I love so I’ll just mention the writers who made me a reader: Charles Baudelaire; Knut Hamsun; Naguib Mahfouz; Henry Adams; Virginia Woolf; W.G. Sebald; William Carlos Williams; Ivan Turgenev; William Faulkner; Kate Chopin; Ralph Ellison; Albert Camus; James Wright; James Baldwin; Jack Kerouac.

Can you tell us a bit about Granta 107, the summer issue?

Granta 107 is a preview, I think, of what’s to come in the next few years; it features new fiction from Kenzaburō Ōe; an amazing photo essay by the American photographer Mitch Epstein on the aesthetic and moral implications of how the US uses power (energy), and an essay to match it about how Homeland Security made it difficult for him to even take the images; Gaitskill’s staggering memoir; prose poetry from Mahmoud Darwish; a moving essay on J.G. Ballard by Will Self; Javier Marías on his fear of flying; a sad and funny memoir by Rupert Thomson about his colourful uncle; a fabulous short story by a writer who will be new to many, Tamas Dobozy. And very strong work from William T. Vollmann, Jackie Kay, Lionel Shriver, Rana Dasgupta, Sam Willetts and Terrence Holt.

A crowd of Granta readers braved the icy streets of downtown Manhattan last Tuesday evening, for Granta’s first-ever New Voices evening at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble. The reading featured one of Granta’s most celebrated authors, Jayne Anne Phillips, alongside two young writers from the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark. American editor John Freeman opened the evening with a smile. ‘Rutgers in the house!’ he declared, and the New Jersey contingent cheered.

The reading opened as Erin McMillan read from her short story, ‘Crossing Cut Creek’. The story follows an eleven-year-old narrator as she obsessively catalogues the world, struggling to comprehend her mother’s problems. Read an interview with McMillan here.

Next, Evan James Roskos read his short story, ‘Conspiracy of Males’. The New Jersey native turned his young protagonist’s insecurities into a vicious chorus. Read an interview with Roskos here, and watch his ‘Conspiracy of Males’ video below.

Jayne Anne Phillips read from her most recent novel, Lark & Termite, an excerpt of which appeared in Granta 82.

John Freeman joined the writers on stage for a conversation about creative writing MFAs and individual process. Phillips now helms the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. She handpicked both McMillan and Roskos for Rutgers, and smiled like a proud mother as her two young protégées fielded questions about the MFA experience. Granta will continue its New Voices feature when Granta.com is relaunched later this month. To read all the New Voices stories, click here.

British political journalist Ian Leslie moved to the United States at the time of George Bush’s controversial victory over Al Gore in 2000, and became fascinated by the panoramic drama of an American presidential election. His election blog, Marbury, was named one of the fifty most powerful blogs in the world by the Observer. He has appeared as a political analyst for the BBC and Sky News, and contributes to the Guardian. His account of the election, To Be President: Quest for the White House 2008, has just been published. You can read an extract here.

In this video for Granta.com, Leslie explains how Barack Obama defeated John McCain, won over African American voters, revitalized campaigning and brought US politics into the internet age. Leslie offers insights into what an Obama administration will be like, and reveals when he first knew for sure that the race was Obama’s to lose.

‘My father encouraged me to lead the life I wanted to lead,’ explains writer and filmmaker Ruchir Joshi, ‘because he had not been able to be the artist he had wanted to be.’ In ‘Tracing Puppa’ from Granta 104: ‘Fathers’, Joshi remembers his father’s struggle to overcome social and political convention, to be his own man. In this interview for Granta.com, Joshi explains how he came to write ‘Tracing Puppa’, reflects on the ‘energy of book-crazed Calcutta’ and confesses to ‘secretly or not so secretly dreaming of writing for Granta’.