Granta’s list of the best young American novelists / 3

Emma Cline’s The Girls was shortlisted for the 2016 John Leonard prize from the National Book Critics Circle.

Granta’s list of the best young American novelists

Once a decade, Granta picks the most-promising authors under 40 in the US and UK. Here are the 21 young American writers to watch this decade

Wednesday 26 April 2017 16.18 BST

Jesse Ball, 38, was born in New York and has published six novels, a number of poetry and prose collections, a book of drawings and a pedagogical monograph, Notes on My Dunce Cap. Ball currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Halle Butler, 31, is a Chicago-based writer. Her first novel, Jillian, published in 2015, was called the “feelbad book of the year” by the Chicago Tribune.

Emma Cline, 28, was born in California and is the author of The Girls, shortlisted for the 2016 Center for Fiction first novel prize and the 2016 John Leonard prize from the National Book Critics Circle.

Joshua Cohen, 36, was born in Atlantic City. He has written five novels including Book of Numbers as well as short story collections and a work of non-fiction, Attention! A (Short) History.

Mark Doten, 38, is a Minnesota-born writer currently living in Brooklyn. His debut novel, The Infernal, was published in 2015. He is the literary fiction editor at Soho Press and teaches in Columbia’s graduate writing programme.

Jen George, 36, was born and raised in Thousand Oaks, California. She is the author of the short-story collection The Babysitter at Rest. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1 and the Paris Review Daily. She lives in New York.

Rachel B Glaser, 34, published her first novel, Paulina & Fran, in 2015. She studied painting and animation at the Rhode Island School of Design and poetry and fiction at UMass Amherst.

Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff, 38, was born in New York; her most recent novel, Fates and Furies, was a finalist for the 2016 National Book award and the 2015 National Book Critics Circle award.

Yaa Gyasi. Photograph by Cody Pickens

Yaa Gyasi, 27, was born in Ghana and raised in Alabama. Her first novel, Homegoing, earned her the 2016 John Leonard award.

Garth Risk Hallberg, 38, was born in Louisiana and grew up in North Carolina. He is the author of A Field Guide to the North American Family and City on Fire.

Greg Jackson, 34, is the recipient of a 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation for his story collection Prodigals.

Sana Krasikov, 37, a Ukrainian-born writer, lived in Georgia and Kenya before returning to the US four years ago. Her latest novel The Patriots was published this year.

Catherine Lacey, 32, was born in Mississippi and is the author of Nobody Is Ever Missing, a novel that won a 2016 Whiting award and has been translated into five languages.

Ben Lerner, 38, was born in Topeka, Kansas. He is the author of three books of poetry and two novels (Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04). His most recent book is the monograph The Hatred of Poetry.

Karan Mahajan, 33, was born in New Delhi. He is the author of Family Planningand The Association of Small Bombs, which was a finalist for the 2016 National Book award for fiction.

Anthony Marra, 32, born in Washington DC, is the author of the collection of stories, The Tsar of Love and Techno and a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle award. He is currently the Jones lecturer in fiction at Stanford University.

Dinaw Mengestu, 39, was born in Ethiopia and raised in Illinois. He is the author of three novels. He won the 2007 Guardian First Book award and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012.

Ottessa Moshfegh, 35, was born in Boston. Her novel Eileen was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker prize.

Chinelo Okparanta, 36, was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. She is the author of Under the Udala Trees and Happiness, Like Water, and is a 2014 O Henry award winner, as well as having won the Lambda Literary award twice.

Esmé Weijun Wang, 33, is a mental health advocate, essayist and the author of the novel The Border of Paradise. She won the 2016 Graywolf Press non-fiction prize for her book of essays, The Collected Schizophrenias.

Claire Vaye Watkins, 33, was born and raised in the Mojave desert, California. Her story collection, Battleborn, won the 2013 Dylan Thomas prize.

THE GUARDIAN

Rachel B. Glaser / Friday Tyrant / Pee on Water

Friday Tyrant - Pee on Water

Just tore over this story for like the 20th time since I first came across it for an issue of New York Tyrant. The issue was called Lady Tyrant and it was all stories written by women.

GIANCARLO DITRAPANO

Jul 31 2011, 7:00pm

Just tore over this story for like the 20th time since I first came across it for an issue of New York Tyrant. The issue was called Lady Tyrant and it was all stories written by women. At the time I thought, “If I put out an issue with all female writers I can avoid, or at least postpone, getting any shit from people about the fact that most of the writers I publish are men.” I don't fucking know why most of the stories in the Tyrant turn out to be written by men. We just pick what we like. Not much more to it than that. Maybe it's a fag thing? Like I'm able to somehow sense cock through prose? Unlikely, but possible. Obviously, women can write fiction just as well as men. Probably better. Rachel B. Glaser, for instance, can do the shit out of fiction. This story has legs. You can tell it will be around forever. Pee On Water is the type of story they'll be saying, "Dang, this shit is, like, classic," about in 500 years.

Top 10 contemporary short stories

Ahead of 2017’s National short story prize, Jon McGregor reluctantly chooses ‘swoony’ work from recent years showing some of the ways to write them well


Jon McGregor
Wednesday 13 September 2017 12.57 BST

T

his summer, I read the entries for this year’s BBC National short story prize, and discussed with my fellow judges the vexed question of how the “best” might be identified.

This was both a pleasure and a serious challenge: the form of the story is so capacious and diverse that at times we were comparing apples and pears, or at least looking at an unfamiliar fruit and arguing over whether to call it an apple or a pear. (Rest assured, though: the challenge is not impossible. An apple is always better than a pear.) You can assess our choices after the shortlist is announced this Friday evening on BBC Radio 4. All five finalists will then be broadcast on successive afternoons on BBC Radio 4 (and made available on iPlayer) starting on 18 September.

But this challenge has been nothing against the request to choose stories to fit the title for this piece. Guardian, please! There are approximately 17m to choose from. Where do I even begin? Where are all the stories I haven’t read, or have loved and then unfaithfully forgotten? (I am a fickle and forgetful reader.)

This list, then, is not hierarchical or canonical. My choices are, simply, 10 tales from this century that I have read and that I think do something interesting or startling or just downright swoony with the form of the short story. Clicking on the titles will lead you to the stories themselves, if you haven’t already read them. I look forward to having my reading horizons broadened in the comments.

George Saunders

1. Victory Lap by George Saunders

Sorry to be so predictable, but I do love George Saunders. With this story, and the rest of the collection it comes from, Tenth of December, he was clearly taking his gifts for voice, character, and satire, and pushing himself to do something much harder and more humane. This story starts awkwardly, in tune with its two gangly teenage protagonists, and stutters through a lovely character study to suddenly burst into an action tale and an unlikely outbreak of heroism. It also offers a dazzling response to the writer’s dilemma of whether to move to a happy ending or a sad ending. On the last page, you can see Saunders looking at the options he has created for himself and simply opening his hands a little wider and saying, ‘Yes, we’ll have both of those.’

2. Pee on Water by Rachel B Glaser

This was my personal standout in the already very strong New American Stories, edited by Ben Marcus. I’m increasingly drawn to any story that has a more expansive sense of a story’s possibility than the “snapshot of life” model insisted upon by the Carver/Hemingway school. This story begins at the dawn of time and ends round about now, which is expansive enough for anyone, I feel. It also has beautiful sentences, and there are not enough of those in the world.

Sarah Hall

3. Then Later, His Ghost by Sarah Hall

This does one of my favourite things in a story: something you weren’t expecting. It’s an apocalypse tale, of which we seem to have had many lately and for which I am quite the sucker, but it’s a whole other and new form of apocalypse, wherein a howling wind rips everything loose from the ground. A real feat of imagination, and all the more terrifying for being set in the made-newly-strange streets of my Norwich childhood.

Kevin Barry

4. Fjord of Killary by Kevin Barry

Barry is great at drawing you quickly into the confidence of his voice; the first few sentences of any of his stories have that quality of strapping you in for the ride. “So I bought an old hotel on the fjord of Killary,” the narrator tells us at the outset of this one, and we can already hear the sigh in his voice. “It rained two hundred and eighty-seven days of the year, and the locals were given to magnificent mood swings.” We lean in, and listen on.

5. The News of her Death by Pettina Gappah

Five women talking in a hair salon while one of them has her braids done: this is all the narrative structure Gappah needs to build a complex social landscape, telling these women’s stories through perfectly pitched dialogue and delicately measured details. The recurring refrain that “Kindness is late” is brilliantly deployed, and the whole story quietly makes the point that hair is always political.

 Alejandro Zambra
Photograph by Ulf Anderse

6. Thank You by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell

As is usually the case, I’ve only just started reading Zambra after years of being urged to do so. This story, of a robbery that starts off violent before fizzling out into a chat about football and a lift home, is told in a jarringly languorous and anecdotal tone, which both draws you in and leaves you uncomfortably dissonant.

Hassan Blasim

7. The Green Zone Rabbit by Hassan Blasim, translated by Jonathan Wright

This story, from The Iraqi Christ, published by the excellent Comma Press, is by turns terrifying and wonderfully banal. In Baghdad’s Green Zone, Hajjar keeps a rabbit while waiting to be briefed on an operation. The rabbit lays an egg. Things get stranger and darker, and Blasim lays his tale out with a wonderfully dry bar-room simplicity that makes the ending all the more explosive.

Nicole Flattery

8. Track by Nicole Flattery

This recently won the White Review short story prize, and it’s not hard to see why. Written in a misleadingly offhand deadpan, Track covers seemingly familiar ground – an abusive relationship, a young woman adrift in the big city, the pitfalls of fame and money – at such an oblique angle that it demands repeated reading. It’s also very funny, and very sad.

Claire-Louise Bennett

9. Finishing Touch by Claire-Louise Bennett

I could have chosen any of the stories from Bennett’s debut collection, Pond – and in fact I would urge you to read the collection as a whole, its sum being, unusually, greater than the parts. I have plumped for this simply because it is so painfully funny. The narrator, “determined to host a low-key, but impeccably conceived, soirée”, details at great length her preparations and in the process reveals almost everything about her own hurt and loss. Bennett’s language is an ornate and long-winded riposte to all those pared-back minimalists, and I love it.

10. The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim

This is a stone-cold masterpiece, as you will see by following the link above. It proceeds with the strange and relentless quality of a dream or fable, while being almost macabre in its realism, and feels like the story Antrim has been writing towards for his whole career. The beauty of it is hard to pin down, but it has a finished and inevitable quality – which it’s occurring to me now could be called soul.

• The National short story award will be announced on 3 October on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row.

• Jon McGregor’s latest novel is Reservoir 13, published by Fourth Estate, priced £14.99. 

THE GUARDIAN

Rachel B. Glaser / Top 10 failed romances in fiction

 ‘Tolstoy so perfectly describes a young woman feeling pretty, I concluded he too once was a young woman’.
 Keira Knightley in the 2012 film adaptation of Anna Karenina.

Top 10 failed romances in fiction

From Sittenfeld to Soucy, Tolstoy to DH Lawrence: the love stories that end in disappointment or sadness can also be the most rewarding and haunting

Rachel B Glaser
Wednesday 13 January 2016 13.30 GMT

As Tolstoy said: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Is this true of romance too? Is a happy romance a cliche? Is a mess more familiar to us?

Readers are witnesses to the unseen motives, fears, and fantasies of characters. A book that switches point of view grants the reader a unique perspective of the relationships in the story, an angle the characters will never see. The reader understands what was at stake, what could have been avoided, what the other one was thinking. Readers are let in on a secret, and the secret becomes very complex.

These complexities of loss and romance are ones I thought about when writing Paulina & Fran. What is romance? Can you have it with a friend? Is it always linked to sex? Does it truly ever die? Or does it just shrink and hide, then glimmer from its hiding place, like glitter stuck in the slats of your floor?

Here are 10 books I loved reading, and all contain a failed connection. I’ve kept my list mostly obscure (to intrigue you), and the descriptions as vague as I can, so as not to keep the plots of these worthwhile reads surprising.

1. I Am Elijah Thrush by James Purdy

This masterpiece of broken and odd love triangles involves two elderly enemies in a decades-long feud, an amateur memoirist, a flesh-eating animal, and a small boy who speaks in bird sounds. Each character has their own unusual, impossible passion. Purdy’s heartbreaking and scandalous tale begins with my favourite first line of any book: “Millicent De Frayne, who was young in 1913, the sole possessor of an immense oil fortune, languished of an incurable ailment, her wilful, hopeless love for Elijah Thrush, ‘the mime, poet, painter of art nouveau’, who, after ruining the lives of countless men and women, was finally himself in love, ‘incorrectly, if not indecently’, with his great-grandson.” Though this story is very amusing, the characters are in an almost constant state of wanting. They have much anxiety, pain, and sorrow over their love. Love is a cruel torture in this book. Moments of joy, surprise, accomplishment, and friendship, ease the mood but do not erase the pain.

2. Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

Young love strikes two prep school students in such a real-feeling and exciting way, I read straight through a whole weekend until the inevitable turn. This skilfully told portrayal of first heartbreak made me empathise, agonise and occasionally admonish the painfully self-conscious protagonist, Lee. Painful moments of misunderstanding during Lee’s parents’ visit to the prep school where this story takes place made me cry, and other moments of inaction made me wish it were a choose-your-own adventure story, so I could guide Lee around.

3. Women in Love by DH Lawrence

This brilliant, thorough novel chronicles multiple romances from multiple viewpoints. Some flourish while others find cruel and violent ends. Lawrence writes from inside the relationships, voicing the duelling minds and conflicting thoughts, exposing the emotional dance at the heart of every romance. Written in 1920, parts of this book feel very modern to me – Gudrun’s fashion and some of the dialogue (“dunno”). In a book of this scope, there is room to explore everything, and DH takes his time describing a mining company, a dying father, a jealous girlfriend, a drowning child, a bleeding horse, an intellectual sculptor, a precocious child, a pregnant flirt, and countless others. My favourite scene is one that flashes between love and anger on a dirt road after a bad drive.

4. Desperate Characters by Paula Fox

This witty, exquisitely written story of daily life in 1970s Brooklyn is filled with vivid characters and examines the somewhat troubled and unsatisfying relationship of a married, childless couple. One of my favourite parts is the backstory of an affair between the main character and a publisher of plant books. A cat scratches the protagonist early on in the story and the suspense will make you late for your appointments. Paula Fox’s writing reminds me of Joy Williams and Flannery O’Connor. Her world is nuanced and unforgiving. Fox talks about people and ideas, fluently, gracefully, culling deep meaning from the everyday.

5. The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches by Gaétan Soucy

All is tragic in this insane and powerful novel translated from the French about eccentric, unsocialised children living in the aftermath of their father’s death. Love is so fleeting in this violently surprising story that one puts the book down in defeat, sighs, then must continue on, like the hero. I read the book in its entirety on a flight back from Spain, and on finishing it, was so awed and struck that I flipped to the beginning and started again.

Miranda July. Photograph: Todd Cole/The Wheeler Centre

6. The First Bad Man by Miranda July

Unlikely pairings are the most exciting. July is a master of the limitless ways two people can connect. Witness a relationship shift and mutate in this freewheeling, hilarious adventure of the heart. A must-read for anyone who loved July’s hilarious debut collection No One Belongs Here More Than You, or any numb reader in need of some laughter or wonder.

7. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The ultimate book of tragic love: a married woman falls for a young officer and their troubled passion turns pages like the book’s on fire. This classic has three or four main threads, and like the DH, really captures life in a distant time and place. I admittedly skimmed some of the passages on farming to get back to these helpless love junkies, whose doomed relationship is startlingly well-written. At one point, Tolstoy so perfectly describes a young woman feeling pretty, I concluded he, too, was once a young woman.

8. Lucinella by Lore Segal

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This meta-novella is a love letter to writing. Early on, the protagonist, Lucinella, meets a poet, but finds him lacking: “What I cannot forgive is the meagerness of the back of William’s neck.” My favourite aspect of this book is that Segal creates older and younger versions of Lucinella and puts them in scenes with Lucinella. So Lucinella must watch William flirt with young Lucinella, and Lucinella must see her future observing old Lucinella. Segal’s wild narration explores disappointment and ambivalence in love in frank, charming, and innovative ways, such as Lucinella watching her ex mourn her from the grave.

9. After Claude by Iris Owens

The protagonist of this hilarious and bizarre book is hating on Claude and his “dark, intense frog eyes” from page one, yet their interactions continue. She declares: “I am essentially a lighthearted person who tries to see the humour in the freak show called life.” Follow her unusual endeavours that lead her into a stranger’s apartment. This book runs on frustration, insults and weirdly beautiful lines that creep by when you least expect them.

10. Bad Sex by Clancy Martin

This dark novella drags the reader through a whirlwind of infatuation, sacrifice, lying, lusting, drinking, crying and nearly dying. In the opening chapter, Brett sleeps with her husband’s banker and her life is never the same. The dialogue and details are so real, at times it felt like a scandalous email from a troubled friend. The sentences are sparse. Not a word out of place. See the tropics and feel the feelings, vicariously, without the hangover.

• Paulina & Fran by Rachel B Glaser is published by Granta Books, priced £12.99. 

THE GUARDIAN

Rachel B. Glaser / The JPEG

THE JPEG

BY RACHEL B. GLASER

Rachel B. Glaser / El JPEG (A short story in Spanish)

t the end of the third week of April, Anna looked to her calendar and felt nothing for the retriever who’d started off the month with such vivacity. It had excessive hair, as usual, billowing in the wind, but the dog’s smile felt forced. Anna flipped the page and stabbed May to the wall with a thumbtack. Oh! The May dog was beautiful! Sniffing at a handful of flowers, eyes wet with life; Anna would have given a month’s rent to be that dog, jobless and loved by everyone.

Mid May, the weather became brilliant. Walking around South Philly with her ex-boyfriend, Anna noticed that the homeless people looked happier. One of them had a mattress set up under an overhang, and was playing music from a boom box. Anna’s cell phone started shaking in her pocket. It was a Rhode Island number. She quickly imagined a post-graduate award she could have won. She accepted the call.