Max Porter’s experimental novel Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (128 pages; Graywolf) follows a father and his two sons as they come to grips with their wife and mother’s sudden death. They do so with the help of an unusual houseguest: Crow, an anthropomorphic projection of the father’s obsession with Ted Hughes’ 1970 poetry collection Crow. Part mythic trickster, part grief counselor, Crow leads the family through an idiosyncratic and irreverent mourning. His air of mischievousness colors the entire novel, lending it a kaleidoscopic tone that renders the mourning process unrecognizable. For Porter, who works as an editor at […]
Tag: Granta
The Fire of Work, and the Concerns of Literature: Q&A with John Freeman
by Oscar Villalon
I’ve known author and former Granta editor John Freeman since (and I’m guessing here) 1998. At the time I was the deputy book editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and Freeman was one of many freelance critics working for the paper’s Sunday Book Review section (which, thankfully, and perhaps miraculously, continues). Freeman is probably the most prolific freelancer with whom I’ve ever worked. (The book critic Martin Rubin would be a close second.) Month after month, it seemed as if his reviews and author interviews appeared in just about every periodical in the country that did any sort of book […]
Do You Know Los Mejores Narradores Jovenes en Español?
by editor
Some seven years ago, Granta, a journal that has become synonymous with the finest literary writing coming out of the United Kingdom – to say nothing about it featuring some of the best writing coming out of the United States – published its first issue of Granta en español. In “a culmination of a dialogue” with the Spanish-speaking world it initiated back then, Granta published The Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists last year. Just as its landmark issue from 1983 spotlighting young novelists from the U.K. (Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Pat Barker, Ian McEwan, Graham […]