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’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.
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.
‘I want the reader to be conscious of reading and not being just drawn into the book and forgetting themselves and forgetting their life.’
Claire-Louise Bennett on her novel Checkout 19.
‘All I wanted was to look at Xu and be looked at by Xu. Be touched by Xu. Be commanded by Xu.’
An extract from Blue Hunger by Viola Di Grado, translated by Jamie Richards.
Sharlene Teo on getting in trouble – part of a new series, in partnership with The Arts House, Singapore.
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