Photograph © Nadav Kander
Ben Markovits in conversation with Yuka Igarashi on minor-league baseball and his experiences as a writer.
Photograph © Nadav Kander
‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
Benjamin Markovits grew up in Texas, London, Oxford and Berlin. He is the author of The Syme Papers, Either Side of Winter, Imposture, A Quiet Adjustment, Playing Days, Childish Loves and the novel You Don’t Have to Live Like This, which won the 2015 James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. He has published essays, stories, poetry and reviews on subjects ranging from the Romantics to American sports in the Guardian, Granta, the Paris Review and the New York Times, among other publications. In 2013 Granta selected him as one of their Best of Young British Novelists and in 2015 he won the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence Award. ‘Picking Up Nathan from the Airport’ is an excerpt from Christmas in Austin, forthcoming from Faber & Faber in 2019. He lives in London and teaches creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
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 →
‘You can be sad and angry, you don’t have to choose, she told him.’
A new short story from one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.
‘When shit like this happens, people don’t walk out on fifteen-year marriages.’
‘For a while it wasn’t clear how good he would become, and then it was. He went up the rankings, stopped, and started going down.’
‘Things started going wrong at my ten-year college reunion – or I guess I mean that I realized how wrong they had gone.’
’Pemi Aguda on Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come, the best book of 2005.
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