Granta 81
Listening to:
S. L. Weiss, sonatas for lute.
Just read:
- Granta 81: best of young British novelists
2003 (contents)
-
This is a fat issue of the literary magazine, and full of
mainly good stuff. Some of the pieces are samples from the authors’
novels, while others are self-contained short stories. I
particularly liked Monica Ali’s Dinner with
Dr. Azad, Hari Kunzru’s Lila.exe
(though it didn’t really read like fiction at all),
A. L. Kennedy’s Room 536, Rachel
Cusk’s After Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of
Isaac (which you can read online),
David Mitchell’s The January man (also online), and Philip
Hensher’s In time of war. I liked
most of the rest, but didn’t think much of Toby Litt’s
The Hare, nor Zadie Smith’s Martha,
Martha.
To review next:
Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s dangerous idea.
Some “interactive” links:
- The Gender Genie,
which predicts the sex of the author of a piece of prose (preferably
500 words or more) by doing very simple-minded frequency
analyses. Paste your text into it today and see!
- A while ago, I wrote about
doing Cambridge admissions interviews. Now it seems Cambridge
is thinking of using a simple test to filter applicants before
they get to do an interview. There’s a sample
at the Guardian, and you can try seven
questions yourself.
Comments