Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil is published by Faber & Faber.
Photograph © Basso Cannarsa
Jeet Thayil talked to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about being shortlisted for the Booker, the images of Christ woven into his novel Narcopolis and an unexpected digression on Blade Runner.
Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil is published by Faber & Faber.
Photograph © Basso Cannarsa
‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
Jeet Thayil was born in Kerala, India in 1959 and educated in Hong Kong, New York and Bombay. He is a performance poet, songwriter and guitarist, and has published four collections of poetry. He is the editor of The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets (2008). His debut novel Narcopolis was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He currently lives in New Delhi.
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 →‘Quitting drugs – what an idea. How final and unaccommodating. Like being left without faith or protection in a pagan world.’ An extract from Jeet Thayil’s Low.
‘To read Baudelaire, he said, is to gather up the world and bring it inside.’
Jeet Thayil on remembering Baudelaire in Paris and Cochin.
‘You are what you do, and you are what you write, to some extent, I believe that at least.’
Lauren Oyler on personality, intention and the collapse between private and authorial selves.
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘The Hindu cowboy accords to the cow the holiest status in his imagination: of mother. It is his duty to protect her honour; it is his privilege to kill for her.’
Granta magazine is run by the Granta Trust (charity number 1184638)
The copyright to all contents of this site is held either by Granta or by the individual authors, and none of the material may be used elsewhere without written permission. For reprint enquiries, contact us.