‘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.
‘I alone know a running stream
that is recovery partly and dim sweat
of a day-fever’
A poem by Rowan Evans.
‘Humour is a thread we hang onto. It punctures through the fog of guilt.’
Momtaza Mehri in conversation with Warsan Shire.
‘Something shifted in me that night. A small voice in my head said, maybe you can make a way for yourself as a poet here, too.’
Mary Jean Chan in conversation with Andrew McMillan.
‘There was to be an exhibition. There were lots of pictures like his, apparently – of waiters, pastry cooks, valets, bellboys.’
An essay by Jason Allen-Paisant from Granta 159: What Do You See?
‘I have started to see that nothing is itself’
A poem by Jason Allen-Paisant from Granta 154: I’ve Been Away for a While.
‘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?’’
‘I tell my dead father if he gives any more advice that rhymes, I’ll leave this story unfinished.’
Fiction by Idra Novey.
‘The windbreakers of the passengers standing at the rail fluttered violently.’
