‘The through line in my work that I see is how easily we can turn people into the other’
Granta Magazine’s Josie Mitchell speaks to Karan Mahajan about being one of Granta’s 2017 Best of Young American Novelists.
They discuss writing about terrorism, the confusions of being an Indian-American novelist, and the limitations of show-don’t-tell in Western writing.
‘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’m from here. I grew up here. In fact, that’s why the government invited me back for this work.”
Short fiction by Karan Mahajan.
‘Too often, a kind of travel writing – especially the novel set abroad in an exotic locale – feels like a way of allegorizing and escaping problems at home.’
Karan Mahajan visits Lexington, Virginia – a centre of the Confederary – in the wake of the far-right rally in Charlottesville.
‘Long before terrorism became fashionable in the West and commonplace in the East, there was a bombing at the Sovereign Center in Delhi.’
‘‘I personally could not tell what exhibits were fake and which were real,’ he wrote. ‘Why would the curators want to create this confusion and mock our very senses?’’
‘When a day is not structured by appointments, meetings, driving to work, taking lunch, driving home, shopping (i.e. capitalism), its soft, loose (wild?) shapelessness becomes apparent.’
