‘I am very interested in the question of reality on the one hand and imagination on the other, so the mirror has to be angled slightly to take in something that isn’t already there’
Granta Magazine’s Luke Neima speaks to Garth Risk Hallberg about being one of Granta’s 2017 Best of Young American Novelists.
Garth Risk Hallberg on how September 11th lead to his first real piece of fiction, the state of American literature today, and the difficulties of getting the perfect balance of realism and imagination into a piece of writing.
Read his story The Meat Suit from Granta 139
‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘Thinking back to that summer of Silas Lucas, I can see my father trying to invent for me the place where the actual and the possible meet to make something new.’
Garth Risk Hallberg on the borderline business of telling stories.
‘All life is suffering. At the zendo where Jolie went Thursdays after sixth period, not much in the way of portable wisdom got dispensed, but this was, near as she could tell, the through line.’
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘Our imaginations are in service to the wrong ends.’
Olivia Laing and M. John Harrison on the commodification of the imagination.
‘I tell my dead father if he gives any more advice that rhymes, I’ll leave this story unfinished.’
Fiction by Idra Novey.
‘For a long time, it was shameful to admit you felt anything except bliss.’
Amy Acre and Liz Berry on motherhood.
