The 1890s saw pioneering works of science fiction, detective fiction, and Gothic horror all published, by some of the greatest English, Scottish, and Irish writers of the age. In the United States, too, novelists addressed social issues, sometimes in comic ways, while social realism continued to play an important role […]
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As the year comes to an end, here are Granta’s ten most popular fiction pieces from 2019:
‘It didn’t take long for the citizens of Moscow to realize that if you had no choice but to stand in line, then Pushkin was the man to stand next to.’
A new story by the New York Times best-selling novelist Amor Towles, featured in Granta 148: Summer Fiction.
‘He often told us how after the Dimming came great chaos and collapse. But before that happened, people had a tremendous capacity to move about and even speak with one another at a distance.’
In February, we published a new story by Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft, in Granta 146: The Politics of Feeling, guest-edited by Devorah Baum and Josh Appignanesi. In October, Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Death Customs | Constantia Soteriou
‘When those horrors happened, many of them couldn’t be buried properly, they had no time to bury them, they just put an excavator there that gathered the bodies helter-skelter, vroom vroom vroom, and put them in a grave.’
Translated from the Greek by Lina Protopapa, Constantia Soteriou’s story was the winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, marking the first time the prize has been awarded to a translation.
My Mother Pattu | Saraswathy M. Manickam
‘My mother Pattu graced our lives largely with her absence, for which my father and I and, to a lesser extent, grandma, were profoundly grateful.’
Malaysian writer Saraswathy M. Manickam is the Asian regional winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize with her story about a mother and her daughter.
American Girl and Boy from Shobrakheit | Noor Naga
‘Question: is romance just a father who never carried you to bed carrying you, at last, to bed?’
This extract from Noor Naga’s novel is the 2019 winner of the DISQUIET Literary Prize. American Girl and Boy from Shobrakheit is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2021.
‘It is their turn to be silent. Your hand is throbbing in protest. There is blood on your knuckles.’
A story of familial inheritance, reincarnation and possession from ’Pemi Aguda.
Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova | Haruki Murakami
‘Naturally, there’s no such record as Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova. Charlie Parker passed away on 12 March 1955, and it wasn’t until 1962 that bossa nova broke through, spurred on by performances by Stan Getz and others.’
Another story that was part of our summer fiction special, this surreal tale circles around a review for a Charlie Parker album that never existed. Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.
The Last Rite of the Body | Sophie Mackintosh
‘My ex-boyfriend dies, and we all gather to put our hands into his body. There is not enough room so our own bodies take it in turns.’
A story by Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure.
Longshore Drift | Julia Armfield
‘There are basking sharks in the upper layers of the water – prehistoric things, nightmare-mouthed and harmless. Plankton-eaters, the way all seeming monsters are.’
Granta 148: Summer Fiction also included this story by Julia Armfield, a British writer shortlisted for the 2019 Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award for her collection salt slow.
‘According to central government policy, I needed to be reformed by the peasants because my class status wasn’t right – both my parents were high school teachers.’
A short story by Jianan Qian on stray dogs, desperation and re-education in rural China during the Cultural Revolution.
The post Top Reads 2019 | Fiction appeared first on Granta Magazine.
The 1960s was a heady time for many, thanks to the Summer of Love and ‘flower power’; it was an age of revolutionary politics and also extraordinary optimism. It was also the age of the Civil Rights movement in the United States, and this, too, is reflected in the selection […]
The post The Best Poems of the 1960s appeared first on Interesting Literature.
Recently I have been searching for a kind of faith. Not particularly a religious kind, although I have looked in churches; run my fingers over the wings of cherubim, paid 50p to light cheap tea candles. But more frequently, I have been looking for a spirituality that lies in food, in friendship, in my own work. I have started to wonder if perhaps spirituality is time, effort put in without hope of return, discipline, care.
I’ve reread The Door by Magda Szabó many times, and on every occasion I come away feeling as though I see things a little differently. That they are both obfuscated and illuminated, like an optician twirling the dials on different lenses. In brief: the narrator is a writer in Hungary who is, after a decade of being blacklisted by the government, finally coming into acclaim. Her husband suffers from a chronic illness, and she decides to hire a housekeeper to help with cleaning and cooking. The woman recommended to her, Emerence, sets her own terms: she interviews her prospective employers, collects character references, dictates her own wage. From the start, Emerence is inscrutable, strange; affectionate one day and cold the next. She can be in turns generous and astonishingly cruel and vicious. Her language is one of traditions and routines, of gestures and sacrifices, both an Old-Testament God punishing his children and a Christ tending to his straying flock.
Emerence rejects organised religion, but her piety is underscored at every turn. ‘It was apparent to me that she had a sister in the Scriptures, the biblical Martha’, the narrator notes. Emerence is an ‘absurd Madonna’, and later we see a vision of her as Christ at the last supper, her supplicants lying at her feet. But she snipes endlessly about Christianity, rejecting church services and the Bible. ‘Emerence was a Christian, but the minister who might convince her of the fact didn’t exist,’ we’re told. ‘She refused to believe in God, but she honoured him with her actions’.
For Emerence, the religion of food, work and compassion surmounts the doctrines and theses of the Church. She possesses what can only be thought of as grace: ‘a pure love of humanity.’ She’s fanatical about her work, carrying out feats that seem impossible for an old woman: shovelling snow from all the doors in the neighbourhood, boiling laundry in a huge cauldron, hauling furniture. She accepts no help in these tasks. ‘There was something superhuman, almost alarming, in her physical strength and capacity for work,’ our narrator notes. ‘Emerence obviously revelled in her work. She loved it.’ An entire language of spirituality arises from the food she provides: honey cakes, crème caramel, thick-gold pastries, a cold platter of rose-pink chicken breasts. Her cooking is inextricably bound to her personal religion of compassion: ‘She served up food to anyone the local grapevine pronounced in need of a good meal.’ The food often seems to be semi-magical – the ‘steaming goblet containing a dark, fuming liquid, smelling of cloves’ that lulls the protagonist into sleep after her husband is taken to the hospital. She does not ask for anything in return. ‘The old woman was interested only in giving, and if anyone tried to surprise her with something she never smiled, she flew into a rage’.
I keep coming back to a quote from Emerence on the faith that lies in everything: ‘My god, if I have one, is everywhere – at the bottom of the well, in Viola’s soul, over the bed of Mrs Samuel Böőr because she died so beautifully.’ The Door is a book about faith, but not because it references the apostles, or ruminates on theological texts, or questions the institution of the Church. It provides an alternative lexicon for spirituality: an examination of the faith inherent in food, work, friendship. Szabó offers a veneration of the rituals of the everyday, for how pride in what we do, in how we give to others, can elevate us.
Image © Patrick Casabuena
The post Best Book of 1987: The Door appeared first on Granta Magazine.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the importance of dwelling and houses in Forster’s classic novel E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End was published in 1910 and written in 1908-10. This can be seen as significant for several reasons. It places the novel in […]
The post Revisiting Howards End: Notes Towards an Analysis of Forster’s Novel appeared first on Interesting Literature.
Pick up any newspaper or magazine, and you’ll see something that’s fairly unusual in the blogging world: most articles contain several quotes – words from people other than the author.
Here’s the start of a BBC News article, for instance, with the quotes marked up:
By including quotes in your blog posts, you can:
You can quote almost anyone in your blog posts. You might go for:
In general, try to keep quotes relatively short: readers may not read a long quote, and if you end up quoting most or all of someone’s blog post, they may well object (as at that point, you’re essentially stealing their content).
There are two key ways to use quotes in your blog posts:
If you’ve written essays in school or university, you’re probably used to both of these.
Here’s a quote in blockquote format:
The highest grade I ever achieved on a school paper was 104% on an essay entitled The Fatal Flaw in William Shakespeare’s King Lear. I have not yet read William Shakespeare’s King Lear.
– 25 Things You Didn’t Know About Naomi Dunford From IttyBiz, Naomi Dunford, IttyBiz
(It’s up to you where to place the attribution. I like to put them immediately after the quote, within the blockquote itself; some people prefer to lead with the attribution, then begin the blockquote.)
To create a blockquote in WordPress, simply highlight the text of the quote and click the blockquote button (which looks like quotation marks):
If you prefer to work with the “text” (HTML) interface in WordPress, type the opening tag <blockquote> just before your quote begins and </blockquote> just after it ends, like this:
Another option, if you’re quoting a tweet, is to embed the whole tweet in your post. (This can potentially cause difficulties if it later gets deleted, though.) For instance, The Guardian’s article How did an Amazon glitch leave people literally in the dark? includes a tweet from Stuart Thomas part-way through:
Using a quote “inline” simply means making it part of your normal paragraph, as we saw with the BBC News example:
This is normally done for very short quotes: one sentence or less. It’s possible to break up the quote to make it more like dialogue (as the BBC does in the second paragraph here).
You don’t need to do anything unusual for inline formatting: simply put the quote in quotation marks and make sure it’s clearly attributed.
If a quote doesn’t quite work when taken out of context, it’s OK to change or add a word or two: just make it clear what you’ve done.
For instance, here’s a long quote that might need cutting down, from Kate Parrish’s post How a Writing Residency Helped This Woman Return to Her Craft:
The literary world was foreign to me at that time, abandoned as soon as I’d graduated college. I was working in healthcare marketing, promoting outpatient surgical solutions for incontinence. Based in Nashville, I traveled the country meeting with urologists, OBGYNs and colorectal surgeons touting the benefits of an implant (“the size of a Peppermint Patty!”) proven to eliminate certain kinds of incontinence. I was 28 and at a professional crossroads.
Here’s the cut down version, which might work well in an article incorporating several quotes about 20 – 30 something women returning to writing:
The literary world was foreign to me at that time, abandoned as soon as I’d graduated college. […] I was 28 and at a professional crossroads.
When you alter a quotation, use […] to show where you’ve made cuts. If you need to change a word to help the quote make sense (e.g. to use a name instead of “he”), then put the change word inside [square brackets].
Incorporating quotes into your posts makes them more engaging and more authoritative – and can even help you with inspiration and structure.
If you’re not already using quotes, think about how you might bring them into your next post…and share your ideas, or your tips, with us in the comments.
This is an updated version of a story that was previously published. We update our posts as often as possible to ensure they’re useful for our readers.
Photo via GuadiLab / Shutterstock
The post How to Best Use Quotes in Your Blog Posts, Including Block Quotes appeared first on The Write Life.