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← Back to all issuesGranta 113: The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists
Winter 2010
From Borges to Bolaño, the Spanish language has given us some of the most beloved writers of the 20th and 21st centuries. But as the reach of Spanish-language culture extends far beyond Spain and Latin America, it is time to ask who is next in this exciting tradition. Granta and Granta en español present twenty-two literary stars of the future.
From this Issue
Essays & Memoir|Granta 113
Essays & Memoir|Granta 113
Foreword
Valerie Miles & Aurelio Major
The foreword for Granta 113: Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists.
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
Stars and Stripes
Santiago Roncagliolo
‘He chewed on the syllables until they sounded the way they did in movies.’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
The Coming Flood
Andrés Barba
‘When it happens, she gets the feeling that the men, for her, are a way to cling to life.’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
The Place of Losses
Rodrigo Hasbún
‘I’m getting a divorce, I’m considering a divorce, I think I want a divorce.’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
Conditions for the Revolution
Pola Oloixarac
‘Everything is there and not there at the same time.’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
The Hotel Life
Javier Montes
‘The room was outside almost everything, certainly outside the law.’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
Gigantomachy
Pablo Gutiérrez
‘There’s no finding a telephone booth with anything more than an amputated cable hanging like a terrible extremity.’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
After Helena
Andrés Neuman
‘What can damage us more? The blunt honesty of hatred, or the thwarted objective of reconciliation?’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
Scenes From A Comfortable Life
Andrés Ressia Colino
‘That nothing that’s consumed is real; what’s real is expensive, and gets consumed slowly.’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
Seltz
Carlos Yushimito
‘I thought I’d found the answer to many of life’s mysteries, but I had no words to share with the world.’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
The Girls Resembled Each Other in the Unfathomable
Carlos Labbé
‘That’s what I was fated to discover. That we’ll never be allowed to experience a desire that we simply can’t handle.’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
In Utah There Are Mountains Too
Federico Falco
‘No one had ever spoken her name in a foreign language.’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
Small Mouth, Thin Lips
Antonio Ortuño
‘This circumstance, death, will not detain my evolution.’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
Gerardo’s Letters
Elvira Navarro
‘The last thing I feel like doing now is going in search of the gnome.’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
The Bonfire and the Chessboard
Matías Néspolo
‘I’m not a snob, it’s just that down here we take chess seriously.’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
The Cuervo Brothers
Andrés Felipe Solano
‘I was Mister Average, right on the borderline.’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
Olingiris
Samanta Schweblin
‘Sometimes she lied. She didn’t do it maliciously; she did it to pass the time.’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
Ways of Going Home
Alejandro Zambra
‘It was hard for me to understand how someone could live alone.’
Fiction|Granta 113
Fiction|Granta 113
A Few Words on the Life Cycle of Frogs
Patricio Pron
‘I wasn’t going to abandon the dream of literature, I was going to keep dreaming.’
The Online Edition
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Poets, Politics and Coca Tea
Valerie Miles
‘Poetry can grab you unawares, overwhelm you. The tears came like a hard rain falling.’
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Andrés Neuman | Podcast
Andrés Neuman & Ted Hodgkinson
‘During the four hours they spent alone three times a week, Hans and Sophie alternated between books and bed, bed and books, exploring one another in words and reading one another’s bodies.’
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Special
Santiago Roncagliolo & Nell Freudenberger
‘Santiago Roncagliolo seems utterly unconcerned with whether we like his two characters, and (as in life) that fact makes them irresistible.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Translations in the Making
Various Contributors
‘I’m still not satisfied. Names are so tough. And so critical.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Colombia | Snapshot
Jaime Manrique
‘Two obsessions dominated my life during adolescence: to become a writer and to find my true love.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Guatemala | Snapshot
Eduardo Halfon
‘The roads of Guatemala have always been its best and worst theatre.’
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Carlos Yushimito and Santiago Roncagliolo In Conversation
Carlos Yushimito & Santiago Roncagliolo
‘We shouldn’t just study people through their archives, but also by being witness to their dreams.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
El Salvador | Snapshot
Horacio Castellanos Moya
‘Don’t mind the sun that beats leadenly down, or the light that stings their eyes, or the danger that lurks nearby, because that’s what life has always been: a little air gulped down amid the crowd.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Tropics of Redemption
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
‘Lest we forget: the novel was invented in Spanish. We entered modern times through the spirit of a novel written in that language.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Introducing Andrés Neuman
Roberto Bolaño
‘When I come across these young writers it makes me want to cry.’