‘Working in the familiar mode of the big historical novel’ ... Yaa Gyasi Photograph: Cody Pickens/
The age of anxiety: what does Granta’s best young authors list say about America?
The US is in crisis - what about its literature? Michelle Dean reports on the list of American writers to watch this decade, which is as diverse as the country itself Michelle Dean Wednesday 26 April 2017 16.50 BST
I
t is a strange time to be making declarations about the nature of American writing. The country’s not exactly feeling well. And even before the events of last autumn, it used to be easier to know what people meant when they spoke of Great American Novels. They meant, chiefly, fat realist ones, usually authored by men. Philip Roth was the avatar of success in that model. He’d put America in the title, construct his characters around some kind of American archetype, and he was off and running.
Twitter fiction: 21 authors try their hand at 140-character novels
We challenged well-known writers – from Ian Rankin and Helen Fielding to Jeffrey Archer and Jilly Cooper – to come up with a story of up to 140 characters. This is their stab at Twitter fiction
Geoff Dyer
I know I said that if I lived to 100 I'd not regret what happened last night. But I woke up this morning and a century had passed. Sorry.
James Meek
He said he was leaving her. "But I love you," she said. "I know," he said. "Thanks. It's what gave me the strength to love somebody else."
Jackie Collins
She smiled, he smiled back, it was lust at first sight, but then she discovered he was married, too bad it couldn't go anywhere.
Ian Rankin
I opened the door to our flat and you were standing there, cleaver raised. Somehow you'd found out about the photos. My jaw hit the floor.
Blake Morrison
Blonde, GSOH, 28. Great! Ideal mate! Fix date. Tate. Nervous wait. She's late. Doh, just my fate. Wrong candidate. Blond – and I'm straight.
David Lodge
"Your money or your life!" "I'm sorry, my dear, but you know it would kill me to lose my money," said the partially deaf miser to his wife.
AM Homes
Sometimes we wonder why sorrow so heavy when happiness is like helium.
Sophie Hannah
I had land, money. For each rejected novel I built one house. Ben had to drown because he bought Plot 15. My 15th book? The victim drowned.
Andrew O'Hagan
Clyde stole a lychee and ate it in the shower. Then his brother took a bottle of pills believing character is just a luxury. God. The twins.
AL Kennedy
It's good that you're busy. Not great. Good, though. But the silence, that's hard. I don't know what it means: whether you're OK, if I'm OK.
Jeffrey Archer
"It's a miracle he survived," said the doctor. "It was God's will," said Mrs Schicklgruber. "What will you call him?" "Adolf," she replied.
Anne Enright
The internet ate my novel, but this is much more fun #careerchange #nolookingback oh but #worldsosilentnow Hey!
Patrick Neate
ur profile pic: happy – smiling & smoking. ur last post: "home!" ur hrt gave out @35. ur profile undeleted 6 months on. ur epitaph: "home!"
Hari Kunzru
I'm here w/ disk. Where ru? Mall too crowded to see. I don't feel safe. What do you mean you didn't send any text? Those aren't your guys?
SJ Watson
She thanks me for the drink, but says we're not suited. I'm a little "intense". So what? I followed her home. She hasn't seen anything yet.
Helen Fielding
OK. Should not have logged on to your email but suggest if going on marriedaffair.com don't use our children's names as password.
Simon Armitage
Blaise Pascal didn't tweet and neither did Mark Twain. When it came to writing something short & sweet neither Blaise nor Mark had the time.
Charlie Higson
Jack was sad in the orphanage til he befriended a talking rat who showed him a hoard of gold under the floor. Then the rat bit him & he died.
India Knight
Soften, my arse. I'm a geezer. I'm a rock-hard little bastard. Until I go mushy overnight for you, babe. #pears
Jilly Cooper
Tom sent his wife's valentine to his mistress and vice versa. Poor Tom's a-cold and double dumped.
Rachel Johnson
Rose went to Eve's house but she wasn't there. But Eve's father was. Alone. One thing led to another. He got 10 years.
A novelist’s job is to get “dirty with the dirty,” W.H. Auden once said. It is a dictum A.M. Homes adheres to, with formidable results. Readers of her marvelous story collection, The Safety of Objects, or her utterly uncompromising (and widely misunderstood) novel, The End of Alice, will rejoice in her latest return to Homesland; as Alice was to Nabokov’s Lolita so Music for Torching is to Cheever’s Bullet Park. Again while paying homage to an acknowledged master, Homes breaks new imaginative ground, her suburban heart of darkness lying even farther down than Cheever’s. Elaine and Paul Weiss—a lower-upper-middle-class couple, a compendium as it were of the various snares and sinkholes of bourgeois abundance—inhabit a rancid paradise bleakly familiar to those of us who grew up in their neighborhood. In what existentialists used to call un acte gratuit, to alleviate unendurable anomie and boredom, they burn down their nice house—squirt starter fluid against the wall and knock over the barbecue of glowing coals. “We’re going out for dinner,” Elaine tells the kids.
Miss Homes is superb at depicting the faint-hearted attempts at normalcy by people whose lives are unraveling around them. She bestows compassion where a colder student of our time would find only suburban scum. “There is,” she writes, “something to be said for the honesty, the extreme humanity of all this faulted flesh.” Down to the brilliant last pages, where “everything is out from under,” Homes’s novel makes a scarifying music, to which we must attend.
—Benjamin Taylor
Music For Torching was published by Rob Weisbach Books.
It was the timing, the deft nearly comic timing that first drew me to the work of Eric Fischl. It was the thing about to happen, the act implied but not illustrated, the menacing relations between family members that made Eric Fischl’s paintings disturbing. It was the way in which he forced the viewer to fill in the blanks, to answer the question: What exactly is going on here? In his early work invariably the answer was sex; first sex, illicit sex, weird sex, seeing or touching something you shouldn’t, rubbing up against the taboos of familial flesh, interracial relations, etc.; the kind of thing you’ve considered, but aren’t necessarily willing to admit. Yet, in order to read the paintings, one had to participate, to admit at least to oneself that yes, we have noticed. It was that, exactly that, the way Fischl subtly and subversively required the viewers to call upon their own experiences, fantasies, nightmares, that impressed me most.
The Bed, The Chair, Touched (2001)
by Eric Fischl
Now, having moved away from the psychosexual drama of the suburban experience to focus on the figure, Fischl remains a compulsively honest painter, depicting the very parts of ourselves we work so hard to keep hidden. In his nudes the body becomes a landscape, the expression of the life lived, physically and emotionally. He turns paint into folds of flesh, curving, contorted, ever-evolving shapes that contain the person we’ve become. His unblinking, melancholy celebration of the body and all its apparent faults are incredibly significant given the current climate of erasure—surgical cancellation and correction of the very marks that other cultures celebrate: age, weight, and the like. In an America that has developed an addiction for blotting out physical characteristics—our most basic identity—by embracing what is plastic and preserved, Eric Fischl has produced perhaps the most terrifying body of work to date: a series of nudes where we see that even the nude, the stripped figure, wears a kind of psychological clothing that goes beyond the skin. What’s hidden is in the thoughts; and this time the figure, the gesture comes closest to the disconnection of madness.
Bad Boy
by Eric Fischl
A.M. Homes In writing, in order to pull a story out you go so far into your mind that when you come out you feel you’ve traveled through time and that either you’ve been somewhere incredibly different or that the world has changed. And that’s a good day’s work, but it’s not necessarily a pleasant experience. In painting, where do you go?
Eric Fischl You go into the painting. I mean it’s the same thing, I would imagine.
Colm Tóibín's introduction to Bram Stoker's Dracula puts the work precisely into biographical and historical context
Anita Sethi Sun 24 Jun 2012
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arking the centenary of Bram Stoker's death, this new edition has an incisive introduction by Colm Tóibín. With razor-sharp acuity, Tóibín examines the context which produced popular culture's most frightening vampire.
Tóibín unmasks the connections between the Irish author's life – as servant to the tyrannical actor Henry Irving, who relished diabolic roles – and literature. Intriguingly, he identifies a "haunting, an interest in doubleness" in work by many writers who, like Stoker, came to London as outsiders in the era: in Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. And he finds "an intense exploration of the drama surrounding visitors, travellers, intruders", which use violence, disguise, and stark imagery of isolation.
Dracula itself opens with Jonathan Harker's evocative journal of a journey through Budapest to the "vast ruined castle" of Count Dracula located "on the edge of a terrible precipice", where the only sound is the howling of wolves. Here, he becomes prisoner. The "rather cruel-looking" Dracula is a compelling creation: a creature who has no reflection in a mirror, he unleashes his "demoniac fury". It is plot as well as place and people that give Dracula longevity: Tóibín describes "a fierce clarity in the outline" and "in how events twist and turn".
This "haunted work" was a conduit for ideas about the rational versus the unconscious being formulated by Freud. "I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool," confesses Harker in his journal. Stoker pulls the reader deep into this "imaginative whirlpool".
Originally published in 1897, Dracula has spawned many modern-day vampires, but this most iconic character still unleashes the mind's deepest, darkest fears.
