‘I really like the artificiality of fiction, even though it’s often embarrassing and clumsy to create something out of thin air’
Granta Magazine’s Luke Neima speaks to Emma Cline, author of The Girls, about being one of Granta’s 2017 Best of Young American Novelists.
They discuss the artificiality of fiction, how we view the world in our early twenties, and ‘the distance between how we think of ourselves, matched with what people are actually capable of’.
‘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.
The author of The Girls and one of our 2017 Best of Young American Novelist shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.
‘He was our younger sister’s baby – her and her husband’s baby, I guess. They were young parents and excessively chill.’
Memoir by Emma Cline.
‘It was the afternoons that did it, three o’clock like a kind of death knell, the house seeming too still, too many hours of sunlight left in the day. How had Thora even started going to the chat rooms?’
‘It was only November but holiday decorations were already starting to creep into the store displays.’
‘Climate change, I realise, is already here. Not the drama of it, not yet, but in the mundane.’
