Photo © Lily Glass
‘These are stories that capture sudden, unexpected intimacies and unearth alternate family mythologies in seemingly innocuous objects.’
Photo © Lily Glass
‘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.
Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California in 1984 and raised in Nevada. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, The Paris Review, the New York Times and elsewhere. She is currently a visiting professor at Princeton University. In 2012, Watkins was selected as one of the National Book Foundation's "Top 5 under 35" and was a finalist for the New York Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Her debut short story collection, Battleborn, won the 2013 Dylan Thomas Prize.
More about the author →Ted Hodgkinson is the previous online editor at Granta. He was a judge for the 2012 Costa Book Awards’ poetry prize, announced earlier this year. He managed the Santa Maddalena Foundation in Tuscany, the affiliated Gregor Von Rezzori Literary Prize and still serves as an advisor. His stories have appeared in Notes from the Underground and The Mays and his criticism in the Times Literary Supplement. He has an MA in English from Oxford and an MFA from Columbia.
More about the author →‘Even in fiction, a writer's job is to tell the truth’
‘The uncooperative cadence of the phrase my myspace page perfectly encapsulates the awkwardness of the early oughts when our story begins.’
‘He had a mind to surf through all crises and shortages and conflicts past and present.’
‘It would be falsely modest to claim that I appreciate the hot dog on any level beneath that of connoisseur.’
A selection of Granta contributors discuss the books they read in 2012.
‘If the god of uranium really exists, then what must he be thinking? Were this a fairy tale of old, what would happen when humans broke the laws of nature to turn gods into minions?’ Hiromi Kawakami on the nature gods of Japan.
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