Rachel B. Glaser | Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists
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Rural Hours
Harriet Baker
‘Housekeeping, cleaning and tidying were domestic rituals; they had a performative, role-playing quality, but were also ways of feeling at home.’
An extract fromRural Hours by Harriet Baker.
Podcast | Declan Ryan
Declan Ryan
‘Some of these bigger characters, Muhammad Ali or Lennox Lewis, they can become these mythologic, mythological characters, or these godlike figures.’
Declan Ryan on contemporary boxing.
Introduction
Thomas Meaney
‘Everybody knows a game is not worth watching unless the players are trying to win.’
Thomas Meaney introduces the issue.
A Good Day
Caryl Churchill
‘I suddenly had one of those I can’t find words for it one of those moments of joy I suppose it is.’
Fiction by Caryl Churchill.
Real Tennis
Clare Bucknell
‘Real tennis players like to say that theirs is the only proper racket sport because the rest aren’t difficult enough.’
Clare Bucknell on a historical form of tennis.
Events Ashore
An-My Lê
‘Designed to face down conventional enemies, it hasn’t won a war since 1991.’
An-My Lê photographs the United States military, introduced by Granta.
Mucker Play
Nico Walker
‘When you said so loudly that you were the best, that you were worth the top dollar, then not just every game but every play became important.’
Nico Walker on the rise and fall of American football, from Jim Thorpe to Deion Sanders.
Round One
Benjamin Nugent
‘On the day the doctors extracted the eggs from her ovaries, he would have to go into a room in the hospital and produce.’
Fiction by Benjamin Nugent.
England’s Other Island
Owen Hatherley & Tereza Červeňová
‘A Victorian summer utopia perpetually falling into dereliction and desuetude.’
Owen Hatherley on the Isle of Wight, with photography by Tereza Červeňová.
Appendix
K Patrick
‘The appendix appeared. Half of it already distended, deep maroon, a twisted and flashing smile.’
Fiction by K Patrick.
Troubadour
Edward Salem
‘There were always too many white activists and upper-class European NGO workers, foreign queers and queer adjacents who were there for the anecdote, hoping to bed a native before their visa ended.’
Fiction by Edward Salem.
Bombed in Beirut
Myriam Boulos
‘What to do as a photographer in a war where even simple family portraits have become trophies?’
Myriam Boulos photographs displaced workers in Beirut.
The Hurt Business
Declan Ryan
‘Honour, or anything approaching it, sits vanishingly low on the priority list.’
Declan Ryan on boxing and the fight between Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois.
The First Person
Kathryn Scanlan
‘I picked up a dry leaf, and when the caterpillar climbed aboard, I carried the leaf to the safety of the grass and set it down at the base of a tree.’
Fiction by Kathryn Scanlan.
Champion
Prarthna Singh & Snigdha Poonam
‘As Prarthna took photographs, I stood in the doorway watching the school-age girls with taut muscles and intense focus lock in bouts across the length of the hall.’
Snigdha Poonam on wrestling and the photography of Prarthna Singh.
The Dance
Mircea Cărtărescu
‘In the center of the palace was the Exit, blocked by a ferocious guardian, whom none could pass.’
Fiction by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter.
A Star in the Book of Liars
Justin Taylor
‘When Jean was nearly seventeen years old, she instigated an affair with a house painter in his early forties who played drums in a Beatles cover band.’
Fiction by Justin Taylor.
Flesh
David Szalay
‘She kneels on the floor and takes it in her mouth again. He’s looking at the top of her head, at the roots of her hair where the blonde, he now sees, is slightly mixed with grey.’
Fiction by David Szalay.
Four Poems
Hu Xudong
‘That shiny / black tooth exuding the indisputable / urgency of the bite’
Four poems by Hu Xudong, translated by Margaret Ross.
The Suffering of Presence and Absence
Leslie Shang Zhefeng
‘Many of these residents are unable to afford life in Shanghai and refer to themselves as “the living dead”.’
Leslie Shang Zhefeng photographs vacant apartments and the people who have made them their homes.
In Her Room
Wang Anyi
‘It would be wrong to say she hasn’t experienced life. Instead, it would be more apt to describe her as someone whom time has slipped by without leaving the slightest trace.’
Fiction by Wang Anyi, translated by Michael Berry.
Images of Women
Elvira Navarro
‘In the years before his stroke, just how many times had her father told a woman he loved her after dating for two or three weeks?’
Fiction by Elvira Navarro, translated by Christina MacSweeney.
International Soul Cultist
Toye Oladinni
‘They started out as fraternities, the cults. Poorer students wanted strong networks, like the ones boarding school pupils had already.’
Fiction by Toye Oladinni.
Podcast | Wang Xiaoshuai
Wang Xiaoshuai
‘It’s more like painting. It’s not like a film.’
Wang Xiaoshuai on the evolution of Chinese cinema and the challenges faced by those working at the vanguard of independent film.
Two Poems
Yu Xiang
‘a centipede devours a grand piano, so / ten thousand fingers / devour Bach’
Poetry by Yu Xiang, translated by Fiona Sze-Lorrain.
Ancestors
Ekhmetjan Osman
‘A cold star breeze, you pass through my eyelashes.’
A poem by Ekhmetjan Osman translated by Joshua L. Freeman.
The Translator
Tahir Hamut Izgil
‘I might walk endlessly’
A poem by Tahir Hamut Izgil, translated by Joshua L. Freeman.
Spam for President
Harryette Mullen
‘My voice may grate your nerves again.’
A poem by Harryette Mullen.
Friends
Jia Pingwa
‘Your friends might never know you intimately. There are those that will know you intimately but never be your friend.’
Jia Pingwa on friendship.
Ocean Hotpot
Si’an Chen
‘I promise you, the committee only looks at two things: how feasible a proposal is, and what it could actually do for the environment.’
A bureaucrat and an entrepreneur discuss environment-saving proposals in a short play by Si’an Chen, translated by Jeremy Tiang.
The Secret Pattern
Aube Rey Lescure
‘My father said there is fate and destiny governing each of our paths, of individuals and of nations, and this only the dead may know.’
Aube Rey Lescure on returning to China.
Malandrino
Joe Stretch
‘On the doorstep, in the glare of the security lamp, was a thin, bearded man holding a black, breathless terrier.’
Fiction by Joe Stretch.
Export-Import
Karan Mahajan
‘Thanks to what Chetan had published, he and his parents were in trouble, and he was exiled from India.’
Fiction by Karan Mahajan.
The Institute
Maia Siegel
‘The Institute was meeting at Yale, at a corner bar with a pool table and subpar beer. It was only a society at this point, attempting to build itself out.’
Fiction by Maia Siegel.
