Image: detail from illustration by Tomer Hanuka in Granta 122: Betrayal
André Aciman reads from the work and speaks to Granta’s Yuka Igarashi about the story, the problem with unreliable narrators and modern poetry, and why self-deception and betrayal are good subjects for fiction.
Image: detail from illustration by Tomer Hanuka in Granta 122: Betrayal
‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
André Aciman is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of the memoir Out of Egypt and four novels: Call Me by Your Name, Eight White Nights, Harvard Square and Enigma Variations. He is currently working on a novel tentatively titled Youth and a collection of essays, Homo Irrealis.
More about the author →Yuka Igarashi is the former managing editor at Granta and was issue editor of Granta 127: Japan. She has taught fiction writing at various universities including Columbia and Parsons The New School for Design in New York.
More about the author →‘I think of betrayal as a crack in the veneer of humanity, an act that reveals to us, and others, our base animal nature.’
‘Your problem is not that you misread signs; it’s that you see them everywhere.’
Photo by Darrell Crawford Before coming to Naples I visited Shirley Hazzard in New York....
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