Fire and Ice
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Pretty Polly
Shinichi Hoshi
‘Compared to all of you, I’m not the handsomest guy or the smartest, which might’ve caused me all sorts of grief if I was a landlubber. But I spent my life at sea, so I got by.’
Paris Desert, Tokyo Mirage
Hitomi Kanehara
‘What I thought was the world yesterday, today I couldn’t even touch its outline.’
Two essays by Hitomi Kanehara.
Podcast | Joanna Kavenna
Joanna Kavenna
‘We all now exist as avatars, on shining tiles in these cubist landscapes’
Joanna Kavenna discusses her all-too-familiar surveillance dystopia, Zed.
One Hundred Years and a Day
Tomoka Shibasaki
‘After a while people’s faces began to fade, and they came to seem like hoards of noppera-bō, faceless spirits gliding by.’
Two stories by Tomoka Shibasaki.
Cheating
Ahmet Altan
‘I get into the police car with four officers from the Anti-Terrorism Branch. They are taking me to the prison.’
Shame
Mieko Kawakami
‘During sex, Narumi would picture herself as steamed rice being turned into mochi rice cakes.’
North Winds Blow the Leaves From the Trees
Yu Miri
‘I liked her quiet regard, the way it gave me a sense of loneliness.’
Nightingale
Marina Kemp
‘She knew it was a trick of the lonely to favour the rude to the simply unmoved; that the loneliest thing in these villages and in this most tucked-away of professions was to elicit no response at all.’
Marina Kemp’s debut novel Nightingale is shortlisted for the 2020 Young Writer of the Year Award.
An Unnecessary Man
Maha Harada
‘I’d lived for half a century, but I had no sense of what that meant; no particular reaction.’
Tongues of Fire
Seán Hewitt
‘Waking, close to morning but still
a shuttered, metal dark in the room’
Two poems by Seán Hewitt from Tongues of Fire, shortlisted for the 2020 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.
The Bookmobile
Kotaro Isaka
‘He told me he had quit his job the day after the earthquake and came out here with nothing but a sleeping bag.’
Podcast | Caleb Klaces
Caleb Klaces
‘I think the infrastructure of community around fathering is very limited.’
We discuss Caleb Klaces’s debut novel, Fatherhood.
VIO
Kanako Nishi
‘I had an odd feeling as I regarded Yō, who knew things about me that I hadn’t known.’
Inferno
Catherine Cho
‘My son was eight days shy of his 100-day celebration when I started to see devils in his eyes.’
Catherine Cho’s Inferno is shortlisted for the 2020 Young Writer of the Year Award.
Surge
Jay Bernard
‘The black is coming in from the cold,
rolling up the beach walls, looking for light.’
Two poems by Jay Bernard, from their debut collection Surge, shortlisted for the 2020 Young Writer of the Year Award.
The Death of Distance
Samrat Choudhury
‘It might take only one soldier being shot across the Chinese–Indian border for war to begin. The howitzers, tanks, missiles and fighter jets are lined up, ready and waiting for action.’
A Ghost in Brazil
Kikuko Tsumura
‘I was ever so keen to visit the Aran Islands, but unfortunately, I died before ever making it out of Japan.’
Podcast | Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh
‘Imagine if an alien came to earth and asked, so how to you reproduce?’
We discuss Blue Ticket and the body horror of motherhood.
The Only Way Out Is Through
Hana Pera Aoake
‘Hiding in kumara pits on the side of volcanoes, I was born with an egg inside me ready to be baked.’
Podcast | Ottessa Moshfegh
Ottessa Moshfegh
‘Unless you are completely shut down and in denial, there’s no way you’re getting out of this without having changed.’
Ottessa Moshfegh on 2020 and her new novel.
On Meeting Margaret Busby
Sarah Ladipo Manyika
Margaret Busby was Britain’s first Black woman publisher. At the age of twenty, she was also one of its youngest.
Podcast | Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado
We discuss the dilemmas presented by her new memoir, In the Dream House.
‘What does it mean to present a face of one’s community that isn’t commonly seen, and that might be seen as bad PR?’
Girl Games
Makena Onjerika
‘There, behind glass panes separating you from the good children, from life itself, you are kept company by your dread.’
Nocturne
Yūshō Takiguchi
Jesse Kirkwood’s translation of ‘Nocturne’ by Yūshō Takiguchi is the winner of the 2020 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize.
Podcast | Momtaza Mehri
Momtaza Mehri
We discuss her collection, Doing the Most with the Least, on the Granta Podcast.
‘don’t be / shocked when I say I was in prison you’re still in prison that’s / what this land means prison.’
Selfish Little Thing
Olivia Rosenthall
‘I began to lie awake at night thinking about all the terrible things I’d ever done, listing them quietly in my head, each selfish little thing, my body numb with guilt.’
Podcast | Jenny Offill
Jenny Offill
We discuss her new book, Weather, on the Granta Podcast.
‘Yes, it's dire. Yes, we're not sure what to do. Does that mean we have nothing to do?’
