Boy, yaar, they sure called me some good names of late:
e.g. opportunist (dangerous). E.g. full-of-hate,
self-aggrandizing, Satan, self-loathing and shrill,
the type it would clean up the planet to kill.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘Damn, brother. You saw what they did to my face? / Poked out my eyes. Knocked teeth out of place’.
Boy, yaar, they sure called me some good names of late:
e.g. opportunist (dangerous). E.g. full-of-hate,
self-aggrandizing, Satan, self-loathing and shrill,
the type it would clean up the planet to kill.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
Salman Rushdie is the author of eleven novels, including Midnight's Children, which won the Booker Prize in 1981. He is a Fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature, and his books have been translated into over forty languages. His new novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights will be published in September 2015.
More about the author →
‘I grew up kissing books and bread.’
Salman Rushdie defends the act of writing novels.
Blake Morrison interviews Salman Rushdie in 1990, one year after he was placed under fatwa.
‘Let me tell you, boyo, bach: I love this place, where green hills shelter me from fear.’
‘You open a book by a writer you’ve never heard of and a new voice leaps off the page and makes you listen.’
‘I'm not quite the same person as the ‘me’ about whom the book is written.’
‘The past has never been as present as it is now in the world. But at the same time, all over the world, the determination to manipulate what we know has also never been stronger.’
The copyright to all contents of this site is held either by Granta or by the individual authors, and none of the material may be used elsewhere without written permission. For reprint enquiries, contact us.