A recording from the London launch of Granta 117: Horror on November 2, featuring readings from contributors Mark Doty and Will Self and their discussion with Granta publisher Sigrid Rausing about blood, the surprising relationship between Bram Stoker and Walt Whitman and the nature of addiction. The recording also features the questions and answers with the audience at Foyles bookshop.
Photograph © Texas A&M University-Commerce Marketing Communications Photography
‘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.
‘an orange plastic basket of compost / down from the top of the garden – sweet dark, / fibrous rot, promising’
‘Behind every man I want to kiss lies that original desire, which it is my nature and my fate to displace.’
‘The only real universals are that we all live – and, of course, we all must die.’
Striking the keys of the same typewriter that once sat under J.G. Ballard’s fingers, Will Self reimagines the legendary writer’s last days.
‘Does it make you a little ghostly yourself, when what’s gone is more present for you than what’s here?’
