‘The fact that you exist means that you have a story that's worth telling’
Granta Magazine’s Luke Neima speaks to Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others and, most recently, Moving Kings, about being one of Granta’s 2017 Best of Young American Novelists. They discuss the attraction (and terror) of the autobiographical form, the freedom conferred by masks, and the necessity of writing from a place of absolute emotional necessity.
‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
‘There’s just no way, unassisted, to commit suicide. But then there’s no way to be just a human, isolated, stripped or just stripped of contexts – because even a cell must have a floor, a ceiling, walls.’
‘The festival dedicated to his late father was scheduled to open tomorrow evening on the Mediterranean island of Midorca and the evening after that Acker was set to present his remarks at the Biblioteca Pública de Midorca.’
Fiction by Joshua Cohen.
‘He was thirteen years old or just about and newly an only child. Newly not a child.’
‘There were always too many white activists and upper-class European NGO workers, foreign queers and queer adjacents who were there for the anecdote, hoping to bed a native before their visa ended.’
Fiction by Edward Salem.
‘It ended up taking fourteen years. But on the other hand, it only ended up taking five minutes.’
Sheila Heti on writing her latest book, Alphabetical Diaries, editing and the instability of a self-portrait.
Sharlene Teo on getting in trouble – part of a new series, in partnership with The Arts House, Singapore.
