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
‘There was really no point in going to a bomb shelter just because the siren sounded. Our hotel was unlikely to be a target.’
Lindsey Hilsum writes letters home from Ukraine.
‘The recipe is a text that can produce spattering because it was spattering before it was language.’
Rebecca May Johnson on recipes, repetition and intimacy.
‘To make a subject of the very same entity I am a part of, to be outside and within it.’
Thomas Duffield photographs his family.
‘There sat the joy of the shopping centre, what I thought of as its secret heart. A white rabbit.’
A story by Dizz Tate.
‘We were ourselves migrating birds; in a sense, refugees, displaced persons, without a home or a home town.’
Volodymyr Rafeyenko (tr. Sasha Dugdale) on the war in Ukraine.
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.
‘What does it say about capitalism that we have money and want to spend it but we can’t find anything worth buying?’
Eula Biss on her book Having and Being Had.
‘Empires fall like milk teeth.’
Stephanie Sy-Quia on her collection Amnion.
‘Careful when you turn your eyes towards someone, you allow them the chance to turn theirs on you.’
Tice Cin on her debut novel Keeping the House.
‘though I’ve sat where torrents recall no slush / I’m drawn by your ceramic explosions’
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