Catherine Lacey discuses voice, characterization and the minute details that bring a story to life
Granta Magazine’s Luke Neima speaks to Catherine Lacey, the author of The Answers, about being one of Granta’s 2017 Best of Young American Novelists. They discuss her latest novel, micro-interactions in literature and translating emotional relationships into prose.
‘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.
‘Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.’
An extract from Biography of X by Catherine Lacey.
‘The church has no thoughts. The church is brick and glass. If they ever slept there, they would see that.’
Catherine Lacey shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.
‘And each time I hit the tarmac I had this terrible feeling that the trip I’d just taken had never even happened, that I’d spent hundreds for a memory I could barely recall.’
‘The possibility that I’d unwittingly tapped into her fate and used it as fuel for a story sickened me.’
‘Naturally the artist is misunderstood. That is normal, and after a while becomes familiar.’
