‘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’.
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
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.’
‘The modern novel can’t sidestep or ignore the idea of evil on an industrial level’
