Peter Carey on Alexis de Tocqueville, writing fiction and the inspiration for his forthcoming novel.
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.
Photograph © Geraint Lewis/REX
‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘I lost my own father at 12 yrs. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences’.
‘You might think, who is this, and I might say, this is God, and what are you to do?’
‘We talked about Alison’s blood. We asked her what she thought this mystery could be. Really what we wanted was to be told that everything was OK. There was a look on Alison's face when she asked. I cannot describe it, but it was not a face seeking medical “facts”.’
‘I tell my dead father if he gives any more advice that rhymes, I’ll leave this story unfinished.’
Fiction by Idra Novey.
‘No person or doll had anatomy like that. It was, she reasoned, some mistake, a dud in the assembly line, but something about it felt special, auspicious.’
A story by Adrian Van Young.
‘Now more than ever environmentalists need to remember what it’s like to write for that real world.’
