‘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.
‘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.
‘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.’
‘He was thirteen years old or just about and newly an only child. Newly not a child.’
‘We master cartography, yet despite everything, we go back and forth often in our lives, directionless.’
Fiction by Marta Orriols, translated by Samantha Mateo.
‘I want the reader to be conscious of reading and not being just drawn into the book and forgetting themselves and forgetting their life.’
Claire-Louise Bennett on her novel Checkout 19.
‘Why can’t the heart keep still and why isn’t the brain smooth to the touch.’
An excerpt from Ariana Harwicz’s novel Tender.
Three months this man’s been off the farm – go back now, back to diesel,...
