Originally I had planned to get to New York the normal way, fly there, but then Harris and I had gotten into an odd conversation with another couple at a party. Our friend Sonja said she loved to drive; she missed having the time to drive across the country. And Harris said, Well, that figures. What do you mean? we all said. Harris just shrugged, took a sip of his drink. He doesn’t talk much at parties. He hangs back, not needing anything from anyone, which of course draws people toward him. I’ve watched him move from room to room, running in slow motion from a crowd that is unconsciously chas ..read more

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Amelia Abraham is the author of Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ+ Culture and the editor of We Can Do Better Than This: 35 Voices on the Future of LGBTQ+ Rights. She is currently working on a novel. Jack Parlett is the author of The Poetics of Cruising: Queer Visual Culture from Whitman to Grindr, the poetry pamphlet Same Blue, Different You and Fire Island. He is currently working on a new non-fiction book about flamboyance. They spoke to one another about queer encounters, the history of cruising and the future of public sex.   Jack Parlett: Shall we begin by reflect ..read more

In this episode of the Granta Podcast, we speak to the novelist Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life (2020) and The Late Americans (2023), about naturalism, the future of fiction, and the connection between Émile Zola and The Sims. We also discuss Taylor’s short story ‘Stalin, Lenin, Robespierre’, which appeared in Granta 166: Generations.   Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.   The post Podcast | Brandon Taylor appeared first on Granta ..read more

Six hours, on the ferry from Aberdeen to Orkney. The sea was like mud: brown mud when the sun flashes on it and turns it silver-grey, rucked up into rims by boot heels. The water gathered into a pinch and pushed backwards; the ship sighed and spat out foam. A gannet flew alongside the ferry for a while, its head yellowed as though by accident: brushed with turmeric or aged like paper. It flew very straight and seriously, its big body close to the window, and I had a strong sense of it as a living thing, an animal, held aloft by its muscles: a thick, sweet potato double handful of bird, choosin ..read more

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He was close enough to smell the hairs on the back of the man’s neck. They almost tickled him, and he tried to rear his head, but found that he was wedged too tightly. There were too many bodies pressed heavily around him; he was slotted into a pattern of hats, shoulders, elbows, knees, feet. He could not move his head even an inch. His gaze had been slotted too, broken off at the edges: he could see nothing but the back of this man’s head, the white margin of his collar, the span of his shoulders. He was close enough to smell the pomade, streaks of it shining dully at the man’s nape; clinging ..read more

This Little, This Late Ageing, you are closer to leaving me. Still born early enough to have tasted it. Drenched in the accident of your birth, the blessing of perfect timing, you wandered your city’s tree-lined streets. Inhaled sharp breathfuls of bougainvillea. Not a year too late. I know this means you will be taken from me sooner. Still wouldn’t have it any other way. You lived the childhood you could never give me. A lifetime too late, I sat between your legs. Slathering my curls with olive oil, you unspooled the reels of your youth. Spaghetti westerns at Cinema Nasar. I craved your cellu ..read more

When you have taught enough fiction writing classes, you begin to take a dim view of craft. I mean craft as maxims, adages, top-down pedagogy. A manual may purport to teach me how to build a table, but such instructions have little to do with the nuances of manipulating the material. It is like this for students of writing, and like this in my own work. Understanding an element of craft in principle, even seeing it executed in practice, offers scant guidance to its artful application. Fiction emerges haphazardly on the page, in response to countless competing necessities. A programmatic approa ..read more

Rocket ship’s broken again on Course Two. I have it all in pieces on the turf, and I’m painting it again, with the NASA site up on my phone so I get the insignia in the right places. ‘Have it done before the tournament?’ Bob asks me. He’s with four wrinkled men wearing polo shirts with Flying Tigers and a big paw print stitched on the left breast. They’re older than me, but not as much older as I’d like. ‘Yeah. Be finished by next week,’ I say. The rocket needs WD-40 and a new weight in the nose cone so it’ll spit the ball onto the green without hitching. My boss, Jaz, finally let me buy what ..read more