‘A lot of writing is confronting your own failure, again and again and again’
Granta Magazine’s Luke Neima speaks to Greg Jackson, author of Prodigals, about being one of Granta’s 2017 Best of Young American Novelists. They discuss the plight of aging Maoist revolutionaries in the US, why Jackson writes from scenarios rather than ideas, and the search for validation that comes with being a writer
‘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.
‘It is hard to devote yourself to something that makes you feel constantly like an amateur.’
Greg Jackson on writing and teaching fiction.
‘Anyone could find courage when the World-Historical Spirit had selected you to enact your martyrdom on the Six O’Clock News. But in the shadows, in secret, unrecognized?’
‘You only have time to live your own life, and mine was falling apart.’
‘I am being, I believe, about as forthright as I am being coy.’
‘Hara had stumbled on a kind of play, as if they were sisters left alone by their parents for the first time to explore the different ways a day could be deconstructed.‘
‘And it’s not just the heat – it’s the humidity, that succubus that pushes the heat index up by ten degrees, makes the roads shimmer with sultry mirages.’
