Multiples | Granta

  • 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.

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

The Author

Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. He is the author of the novels Politics and The Escape, and Kapow!, a novella, as well as a book of international novels, which won a Somerset Maugham award. His work has been translated into 30 languages.

More about the author →

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.’