‘I can’t fathom being interested in writing without the excitement of the possibility of the sentence.’
Back in the early summer of 2020, the writer Kathryn Scanlan joined Josie Mitchell to talk about her story collection, The Dominant Animal. They discussed her precarious worlds, the drama of the sentence and working with the writer and editor Diane Williams.
‘Fable’, a story taken from The Dominant Animal , is available to read here.
‘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.
‘It seemed perfectly normal for middle-class writers to tell the stories of the underclass. But the presumed creator of literature has been changing.’
Granta interviews Wu Qi.
‘I settled in, decades ago, to the idea that I was just going to write from a gay position, without explanation or excuse.’
Alan Hollinghurst on writing from the outsider’s perspective and cataloguing queer life.
‘How would I feel if I had messaged for years with someone that I later found out was an AI?’
Brea Souders speaks to Alice Zoo about chatbots, interconnection and the dialogue between photography and text in her work.
‘You are what you do, and you are what you write, to some extent, I believe that at least.’
Lauren Oyler on personality, intention and the collapse between private and authorial selves.
‘It’s perhaps hard to imagine a country with abundant mineral or oil reserves simply leaving that wealth underground. But there are precedents here, historical and contemporary.’
Granta interviews Thea Riofrancos.
‘I would have dreams that woke me in the middle of the night, my heart shaking inside my body.’
