With the year coming to a close, we’re rounding up some of our best pieces of 2017. These were some of the most popular pieces on our website in the past year.
The Husband Stitch, Carmen Maria Machado
One of our favourite stories from 2014 came back in a big way this year, when the author, Carmen Maria Machado, put out her first collection to great acclaim. Jane Dykema wrote a brilliant review of ‘The Husband Stitch’ for Electric Literature.
The essays of Rachel Cusk
People have been revisiting Rachel Cusk’s excellent work in the Granta archives following the success of her books Outline and Transit, and a New Yorker profile that positions her as ‘a wickedly clever stylist, who fired off aphorisms like a French court diarist’.
An interview with Toni Morrison
When Morrison was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Obama, he whispered something in her ear. When asked what he said, Morrison admits that, awestruck, she missed the words. This interview combines an important discussion of race with warm, amusing anecdotes from Morrison’s remarkable life.
Travel writer, Geoff Dyer responds to the question, ‘Is Travel Writing Dead?’
As part of Granta 138: Journeys, we ran a series asking travel writers authors ‘Is Travel Writing Dead?’ The most popular response was Geoff Dyer’s: ‘We read – often while sitting on a form of mass transit – in order to be privately transported. Geographical distance has nothing to do with it.’
A memoir piece from Sinéad Gleeson
Gleeson struck a chord with her moving memoir piece about her Aunt Terry’s struggle with Alzheimer’s.
‘They say it started with blackouts. Falling like a felled tree in unforested places. Several times, outside the strip of shops she lives near. The locals all know her, so whenever it happens, they run to my brother’s house and hammer at his door.’
Susan Straight’s GPS map of American literature
In 2017, Susan Straight undertook to capture the American landscape through novel covers, ‘I wrote until near dawn, wanting a map of the literary nation, a beautiful evocation of how we are truly a nation of village and city and prairie and brownstone, of Rockies and bayous and mesas.’
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