‘The through line in my work that I see is how easily we can turn people into the other’
Granta Magazine’s Josie Mitchell speaks to Karan Mahajan about being one of Granta’s 2017 Best of Young American Novelists.
They discuss writing about terrorism, the confusions of being an Indian-American novelist, and the limitations of show-don’t-tell in Western writing.
‘There’s this paradoxical nostalgia where even though yi suffered, yi miss it.’
Memoir by Graeme Armstrong.
‘She boils her sentences down to high-sucrose sweeties and calibrates her tone for maximum engagement.’
Fiction by Natasha Brown.
‘The monstrous years of my late teens lay lined up alongside the rest of my life like bullets in a gun.’
A story by Sophie Mackintosh.
‘Without waiting for me she removes her white shirt. Each button a piece of my own spine, undone.’
Fiction by K Patrick.
‘I followed him onto the dancefloor and he put his hands on my hips as if he’d known me for at least an hour.’
Fiction by Saba Sams.
‘Too often, a kind of travel writing – especially the novel set abroad in an exotic locale – feels like a way of allegorizing and escaping problems at home.’
Karan Mahajan visits Lexington, Virginia – a centre of the Confederary – in the wake of the far-right rally in Charlottesville.
‘Long before terrorism became fashionable in the West and commonplace in the East, there was a bombing at the Sovereign Center in Delhi.’
‘‘I personally could not tell what exhibits were fake and which were real,’ he wrote. ‘Why would the curators want to create this confusion and mock our very senses?’’
‘India, as we know it, is changing. What will it become?’
Memoir by Amitava Kumar.
‘I truly hate food, I said to Isidor. I just can’t take it any more. F*** food!’
