- Published: 01/08/2013
- ISBN: 9781846275395
- Granta Books
- 448 pages
Multiples
Adam Thirlwell
Like Chinese whispers, the rules of this literary game are simple: the first writer translates an unknown story into English, which a second writer then translates into a different language, and a third translates back into English, and so on, down the line. As the stories are told and retold, out of English and in again, they are transformed, twisted and turned into something new.
Featuring an all-star international line-up of writers from Zadie Smith to Alejandro Zambra, via Jeffrey Eugenides, Laurent Binet, Javier Marías, David Mitchell, Colm Tóibín, Etgar Keret, and Sheila Heti, this collection is pure literary entertainment. Playful, provocative and wilfully inventive, Multiples asks fascinating questions about the relationship between a translation and a version, about the art of storytelling, and about the way that our individual linguistic choices reflect our shared cultural prejudices. Here, we see not so much what is lost in translation, but what is found.
£20.00
I can imagine dipping into this delightful compendium for years to come... For all its parlour-game charms, it is subversive at heart, challenging just about everything we hold true about authenticity, originality and creative genius... Brilliant
Maureen Freely, The Times
The whole thing is big, preposterously ambitious and pleasingly silly. But meaningful, too... A fascinating experiment in language and the effects of style
Daniel Hahn, Guardian
Somehow manages to be simultaneously profoundly fun literary entertainment and profoundly serious literary/philosophical investigation... This is the best game of Chinese whispers we've ever seen in print
Stuart Hammond, Dazed and Confused
Adam Thirlwell on Granta.com
In Conversation | The Online Edition
Adam Thirlwell | Podcast
Adam Thirlwell & Yuka Igarashi
Adam Thirlwell speaks to Granta’s Yuka Igarashi about sex, history, translation, using tempo in novels and how his writing has evolved over the past decade.
Fiction | Granta 123
Slow Motion
Adam Thirlwell
‘It really wasn’t normal for me to wake up and not know how I got there. A normal pastime for me was to be intent on mathematical problems, or models of voting patterns in different democratic states.’
In Conversation | Granta 123
Adam Thirlwell on Michel Laub
Michel Laub & Adam Thirlwell
‘The thing I really love about this story is how it manages its matryoshka feat – to be at once a free floating meditation, leaping like some street cat from wall to wall, while also going deeper and deeper into a single theme.’