‘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.
‘There is only one of me, she says, / but we all know there are two.’
‘The poor dish looks just like me.’
Margaret Busby was Britain’s first Black woman publisher. At the age of twenty, she was also one of its youngest.
‘I want to eat your rough hand that caresses me.’
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?’
‘There, behind glass panes separating you from the good children, from life itself, you are kept company by your dread.’
‘The hole felt as though it was exactly my size – a trap made just for me.’
Jesse Kirkwood’s translation of ‘Nocturne’ by Yūshō Takiguchi is the winner of the 2020 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize.
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.’
‘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.’
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?’
‘It’s normal not to be offered anything to eat or drink when you are a princess.’
‘My face, not the glass, was blurry. I had no idea what I really looked like besides lumpy, fuzzy, profuse.’
