‘The fact that you exist means that you have a story that's worth telling’
Granta Magazine’s Luke Neima speaks to Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others and, most recently, Moving Kings, about being one of Granta’s 2017 Best of Young American Novelists. They discuss the attraction (and terror) of the autobiographical form, the freedom conferred by masks, and the necessity of writing from a place of absolute emotional necessity.
‘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.
‘There’s just no way, unassisted, to commit suicide. But then there’s no way to be just a human, isolated, stripped or just stripped of contexts – because even a cell must have a floor, a ceiling, walls.’
‘He was thirteen years old or just about and newly an only child. Newly not a child.’
‘It ended up taking fourteen years. But on the other hand, it only ended up taking five minutes.’
Sheila Heti on writing her latest book, Alphabetical Diaries, editing and the instability of a self-portrait.
‘The Eilat–Ashkelon pipeline went into operation in 1969, on the eve of the nationalisation of oil.’
Laleh Khalili on energy politics and the ‘secret’ pipeline transporting crude oil across southern Israel.
‘We master cartography, yet despite everything, we go back and forth often in our lives, directionless.’
Fiction by Marta Orriols, translated by Samantha Mateo.
Innocent Chizaram Ilo’s ‘When a Woman Renounces Motherhood’ is the 2020 Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize regional winner from Africa.
