Image: detail from illustration by Tomer Hanuka in Granta 122: Betrayal
André Aciman reads from the work and speaks to Granta’s Yuka Igarashi about the story, the problem with unreliable narrators and modern poetry, and why self-deception and betrayal are good subjects for fiction.
Image: detail from illustration by Tomer Hanuka in Granta 122: Betrayal
‘The issue was the first of its kind. Trust me, it said. I know what I am talking about. These young writers are the future of literature. Watch. History will prove me right.’ – Bill Buford, Granta editor (1979-95)
‘Cover your nose and mouth, the order came, swift and useless; if they’d had their turbans they would have wound them around their faces but there were only the balaclavas.’
Fiction by Kamila Shamsie from the 2013 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘She felt exhausted, emptied out; she thought of the day that had passed – it was astonishing to her, that a single set of hours could contain so many separate states of violent feeling.’
Fiction by Sarah Waters from the 2003 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘This is the one thing I know from the minute I lift the receiver and slip that voice inside my ear: it will happen.’
Fiction by A.L. Kennedy from the 1993 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘As it was, my grandfather began helping me to paint without my having to ask him.’
Fiction by Kazuo Ishiguro from the 1983 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
André Aciman is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of the memoir Out of Egypt and four novels: Call Me by Your Name, Eight White Nights, Harvard Square and Enigma Variations. He is currently working on a novel tentatively titled Youth and a collection of essays, Homo Irrealis.
More about the author →Yuka Igarashi is the former managing editor at Granta and was issue editor of Granta 127: Japan. She has taught fiction writing at various universities including Columbia and Parsons The New School for Design in New York.
More about the author →‘I think of betrayal as a crack in the veneer of humanity, an act that reveals to us, and others, our base animal nature.’
‘Your problem is not that you misread signs; it’s that you see them everywhere.’
‘It began as a vacuum in the atmosphere, far out over the Atlantic. Trying to fill itself, it set up a spinning mass of air, like a plughole sucking water from a bath; but the faster the winds blew, the more the vacuum deepened.’
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