‘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.
In this episode of the Granta Podcast, we speak to the novelist and critic Lauren Oyler, author of No Judgement (2024) and Fake Accounts (2024), about living in Berlin, the boundary between our private and public selves, and the trajectory of autofiction.
We also discuss Oyler’s essay, ‘Last Week at Marienbad’, which appeared in Granta 165: Deutschland.
You can read ‘Last Week at Marienbad’ here.
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‘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.
‘The only thing on the schedule was spa.’
Lauren Oyler on her trip to Marienbad.
‘It seemed perfectly normal for middle-class writers to tell the stories of the underclass. But the presumed creator of literature has been changing.’
Granta interviews Wu Qi.
‘I settled in, decades ago, to the idea that I was just going to write from a gay position, without explanation or excuse.’
Alan Hollinghurst on writing from the outsider’s perspective and cataloguing queer life.
‘How would I feel if I had messaged for years with someone that I later found out was an AI?’
Brea Souders speaks to Alice Zoo about chatbots, interconnection and the dialogue between photography and text in her work.
‘My instinct often is to swerve, to try to commit to some kind of reversal on received logics and see how far I can go with it.’
Rachel Kushner on the mystery of prehistory and the true depth of a cave.
