Exit Strategy
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Second Dispatches from Ambassador to Brazil, Earth
Juan Pablo Villalobos
‘Forget about football: queuing and stamping are Brazil’s national sports.’
Anecdotes
Ann Beattie
‘Christine’s hair had begun to dry, and she looked different, with her hair down and her glasses on. Her earnestness made her look younger, and took me back to the bar where we’d sat in Pennsylvania years ago.’
Introducing Tatiana Salem Levy
A.L. Kennedy
Tatiana Salem Levy is introduced by previous double Best of Young British Novelist, A.L. Kennedy.
Dispatches from Ambassador to Brazil, Earth
Juan Pablo Villalobos
‘In Brazil it is crucial not to be Argentinian. Add that to our Earth mission’s proceedings manual under the topic ‘Cultural Affairs’.’
Deborah Levy | Podcast
Deborah Levy & Ted Hodgkinson
Here Deborah Levy spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about why as she wants to resist anything resembling a comfort zone and why writing fiction is about ‘finding reasons to live’.
Brad Feuerhelm | Podcast
Brad Feuerhelm & Ted Hodgkinson
Brad Feuerhelm spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about the stories that lie behind his images from the issue and how his work is informed by his love of horror movies.
Alison Moore | Podcast
Alison Moore & John Freeman
Alison Moore spoke to John Freeman about the experience of being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, why her characters often find themselves enclosed in a memory and writing short.
Hilary Mantel Wins Second Booker Prize
Anne Meadows
In 2009 Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker Prize for her extraordinary novel Wolf Hall....
Jeet Thayil | Podcast
Jeet Thayil & Ted Hodgkinson
Jeet Thayil talked to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about being shortlisted for the Booker, the images of Christ woven into his novel Narcopolis and an unexpected digression on Blade Runner.
The Island of Hawkers
Tan Twan Eng
‘Suspecting (rightly) that you have been eating diluted, unauthentic versions of the real thing, you realize you have to go to Penang, the best place to eat street food in Malaysia.’
Mo Yan | Interview
Mo Yan & John Freeman
‘My life is more current, more contemporary and the cutting throat cruelty of our contemporary times limits the romance that I once felt.’
Victor LaValle | Interview
Victor LaValle & John Freeman
‘Our battle is between those trapped inside the institutions of modern American life (our economic and political systems in particular) and those who manipulate such institutions for their own profit.’
Grand Mal
Patrick Ryan
‘And this is what very few novels or movies have ever gotten right about amnesia: it’s not exotic; it’s horrific and sad-making. I was sad because I had no story.’
D.T. Max | Podcast
D.T. Max
D.T. Max on about why ‘David always wanted to be one David’, the solace he found in twelve-step programmes and what his use of wiper-fluid, on a car ride with Jonathan Franzen, reveals about his prose style.
The Wig
Han Dong
‘Hu Yanjun had got his hands on a wig, and was trying it on in front of the mirror when his friend Wang Xinghai came to see him.’
Han Dong | Interview
Han Dong & Philip Hand
‘Inflaming readers isn’t a good thing; I want to entice them.’
Religion Against Humanity
Wole Soyinka
‘The world should not continue to acquiesce in the brutal culture of extremism that demands the impossible.’
The Metaphoreign Body
Tod Wodicka
‘Finally, I was reduced to a piece of matter, solid and real and mute and totally absorbed inside a foreign system.’
Salman Rushdie | Interview
Salman Rushdie & John Freeman
‘I'm not quite the same person as the ‘me’ about whom the book is written.’
A Dose of Winter Medicine
Kseniya Melnik
‘I looked at the carpet in her small living room. This is where she had fallen and lay for twenty-four hours before her younger sister, Auntie Tanya, had found her.’
Meeting the psychiatrist’s wife
Lorraine Mariner
‘The psychiatrist’s wife / has a dress the colour / of that bottle of claret / you shouldn’t have drunk / last night.’
Shackleton’s Medical Kit
Gavin Francis
‘Each box was like the distillation of all that we have learned as a species about our bodies and their infirmities, a time capsule of medicine at the start of the twenty-first century.’
Anthony Shadid
Cecil Hourani
‘Anthony’s life was a triumph and a tragedy. It was a tragedy which I believe he foresaw.’
Accident
Etgar Keret
’Thirty years I’m a cabbie,’ the small guy sitting behind the wheel tells me, ’thirty years and not one accident.’
The Doctor Will See You Now
Amit Majmudar
‘The patients who really need seeing are usually unaware they are being seen.’
Nicola Barker | Interview
Nicola Barker & Yuka Igarashi
‘I’ve always thought of myself as someone who writes outside of the dominant culture; an outsider looking in.’
Even Pretty Eyes Commit Crimes
M.J. Hyland
‘My father was sitting on my doorstep. He was wearing khaki shorts, his bare head was exposed to the full bore of the sun, and he was holding a pineapple.’
The Burning of the Rocks
John Kinsella
‘What locked-away / state of unawareness, other life form, / brings desire to combust / out of rock exposed to flame’
Throwing Stones at the Moon
María Victoria Jiménez
‘Maybe if I’d participated more when I was a student, I’d have had a well formed outlook about who people really are, and I would have better grasped evil.’
Zadie Smith | Interview
Zadie Smith & Ted Hodgkinson
Zadie Smith on writing tighter sentences, the ‘essential hubris’ of criticism and why novelists prefer writing in their pyjamas.
Into the Cosmos
Chloe Aridjis
‘In those fervently atheist times, it wasn’t God or his angelic messengers who would come forth from the sky, but the cosmonaut.’
Edinburgh Book Festival Special | Podcast
Kapka Kassabova & Peter Stamm
In this special Edinburgh Book Festival edition of the Granta Podcast Laura Barber talks to Kapka Kassabova (Street Without a Name, Twelve Minutes of Love) and Peter Stamm (Seven Years) about the often paradoxical relationship between writing and place.
