Photo © Lily Glass
‘These are stories that capture sudden, unexpected intimacies and unearth alternate family mythologies in seemingly innocuous objects.’
Photo © Lily Glass
‘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.
Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California in 1984 and raised in Nevada. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, the New York Times and elsewhere. She is currently a visiting professor at Princeton University. In 2012, Watkins was selected as one of the National Book Foundation's "Top 5 under 35" and was a finalist for the New York Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Her debut short story collection, Battleborn, won the 2013 Dylan Thomas Prize.
More about the author →Ted Hodgkinson is the previous online editor at Granta. He was a judge for the 2012 Costa Book Awards’ poetry prize, announced earlier this year. He managed the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Tuscany, the affiliated Gregor Von Rezzori Literary Prize and still serves as an advisor. His stories have appeared in Notes from the Underground and The Mays and his criticism in the Times Literary Supplement. He has an MA in English from Oxford and an MFA from Columbia.
More about the author →‘Even in fiction, a writer's job is to tell the truth’
‘The uncooperative cadence of the phrase my myspace page perfectly encapsulates the awkwardness of the early oughts when our story begins.’
‘He had a mind to surf through all crises and shortages and conflicts past and present.’
‘It would be falsely modest to claim that I appreciate the hot dog on any level beneath that of connoisseur.’
A selection of Granta contributors discuss the books they read in 2012.
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