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As we enter the final days of 2019, here are our ten most popular non-fiction posts from the year:

 

Her Left Hand, The Darkness | Alison Smith 

Alison Smith shares what she learned from Ursula K. Le Guin:

1. Not everyone who thinks they’re better than you actually is.
2. Speaking your mind is better than hiding your mind.
3. Trying to be an author is a very bad idea.

 

On High Heels and Lotus Feet | Summer Brennan

‘Natural feet were considered manly, and so the natural state of the body became masculine; one had to sculpt, suffer, and reinvent to be read as female.’

Summer Brennan on high heels, foot-binding, and our ongoing performances of gender. An excerpt from her book High Heel, part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series.

 

Lost Cat | Mary Gaitskill

‘Which deaths are tragic and which are not? Who decides what is big and what is little?’

This memoir by Mary Gaitskill was included in our bumper spring issue, Granta 147: 40th-Birthday Special, which collected some of our favourite pieces from the past forty years. ‘Lost Cat’ was first published in 2009.

 

The Resurgence of the Monstrous Feminine | Hannah Williams

‘Despite the sheer and uncommunicable amount of violence enacted upon the female body throughout history, it’s woman as terroriser, as beast, that we keep coming back to.’

Hannah Williams on horror, hexes and harpies.

 

Confessions of a White Vampire | Jeremy Narby

‘Many of the people I was living with considered me a white vampire, who killed to extract human fat.’

Jeremy Narby, who spent close to two years in Peru living with Ashaninca people, writes about a particular kind of resource extraction in the Amazon.

 

Touch | Poppy Sebag-Montefiore

‘Touch had its own language, and the rules were the opposite of the ones I knew at home.’

From Granta 146: The Politics of Feeling, Poppy Sebag-Montefiore, former BBC correspondant in Beijing, writes on public touch in China.

 

How to Take a Literary Selfie | Sylvie Weil

‘I found myself immediately identifying with certain self-portraits, as if they were snapshots that mirrored (imaginary) self-portraits of my own.’

Sylvie Weil explains how she began writing literary selfies. Translated from the French by Ros Schwartz.

 

The Power of a Name | Rebecca Tamás

‘When English is the dominant everything, you can’t help wanting to fight for the little speck of the rest of your self.’

Rebecca Tamás on why the accent in her last name matters.

 

Politics in the Consulting Room | Adam Phillips & Devorah Baum

‘In politics people think they know what they want, and in psychoanalysis the assumption is that they don’t know.’

Psychotherapist and literary critic Adam Phillips in conversation with Devorah Baum, co-guest editor of Granta 146: The Politics of Feeling.

 

Love After Abuse | Lucia Osborne-Crowley

‘I am bleeding but I don’t know it yet, so the blood is silently leaking onto the white fabric like a poorly-kept secret, like proof that I will never be as clean as I pretend to be.’

Lucia Osborne-Crowley on the complexity of navigating sexuality while recovering from sexual abuse.

The post Top Reads 2019 | Non-Fiction appeared first on Granta Magazine.

In the wake of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, there was a scramble to commodify in literary form what had happened, with works like Yasmine El Rashidi’s 2011 The Battle for Egypt and Ahdaf Soueif’s 2012 Cairo: My City, Our Revolution being pumped through the publishing industry almost before the blood had dried in Tahrir. For understandable reasons (like the maddening discrepancy between collective experience and the official state-sponsored media coverage of protests), these works are anxious to document; they’re journalistic, chronological, and, in light of how much was lost and how little has changed since 2011, they’re depressingly idealistic. Then there’s Youssef Rakha’s 2013 The Crocodiles, an experimental work which describes itself – aptly – as post-despair.

The Crocodiles is the first book in a trilogy about a group of Egyptian poets who were active from 1997 to 2001, the 90s-generation. There are no chapters or page numbers. It is divided into numbered vignettes, but rather than being linearly ordered, these vignettes are in orbit, spiraling outward in larger, looser concentric circles before tightening in again, dizzying vortically like drain water. The idol at the heart of all this devotional spinning, however, is not revolution. There is almost nothing of the protest-porn one expects from works published at the time, despite the narrator speaking from the vantage point of the revolution’s aftermath, and despite his obvious heartbreak over its failings. Instead, he roams around the grungy intellectual circles in Cairo at the turn of the millennium with his two friends: Paulo, a photographer in love with an older married woman making a fool of him, and Nayf the orphan, so obsessed with translating Allen Ginsberg’s ‘The Lion for Real’ that he begins to hallucinate a lion, for real. Stylistically, the vignettes are conversational, melancholic, taut as prose poems. Here is the first:

1. On the twenty-first birthday of a poet, ostensibly of our group, whom we knew as Nayf (his real name’s not so very important)—on June 20, 1997, to be precise—the activist Radwa Adel went to visit a relative in one of Cairo’s neighborhoods…. Radwa Adel played with her relative’s children for a little while, then took herself off for an afternoon nap in the bedroom with the balcony. There was nobody at home but the young children, and no sooner had the bedroom door swung back behind her than she went out onto the balcony and jumped over the wall.

Radwa Adel’s character is based on the 70s-generation poet and activist, Arwa Saleh, who did actually commit suicide by balcony in 1997, just a year after her only collection The Premature was published. Her suicide hangs over the rest of the novel like an invitation or a dare. It was the fashion then to appear unhinged and volatile, but ultimately there were those who came to the edge and jumped, those who came to the edge and didn’t jump. This novel is about how to manage despair. Prematurity and coincidences of synchronicity are also themes that vein thickly through The Crocodiles, which is obsessed with – and highly superstitious about – time. Despite the nonlinearity of the narrative, there is a painstaking, almost unhealthy, effort to understand the chronology of minute interpersonal dramas that the characters undergo, as though doing so might explain to all of us, shell-shocked in the aftermath of 2011, just what the hell happened.

We see through the narrator’s increasingly cynical eye the underground world of activists and artists, their petty quibbles and hypocritical ideologies, raving house parties, acid trips, poetry, their violent sex and even more violent heartbreaks, just a few years before these same individuals would take to the streets. It was a dark time to be in Cairo, with so many young people feeling claustrophobic, nihilistic, and in abeyance, turning on themselves and each other. ‘It strikes me now’, says the narrator, ‘that those shrunken spaces where we lived – the places that narrowed about us in the nineties – were the very places where the security forces corralled us when we took to the streets and which one thousand five hundred martyrs or more and one whole year were not sufficient to make wider’. Without being defeatist, this is the sobering reality that The Crocodiles brings to Cairo in the new millennium: that there was a revolution and nothing changed because we as a people have not changed.

399. Ten years on—while from afar I follow the progress of a revolution we were waiting for not knowing that we waited and which, when it came, thundering through like the last train, left us shell-shocked on the platform—I think how all of us became a case or tragedy: if any memory should remain to us, its gist shall always be the ignominies of love and death and birth. Did all this happen so that we might be a fitting subject for the gossip of a slightly greater number of people? I feel my body sinking in the soup as I wonder: All this?

It has to be said that The Crocodiles is philosophical before it’s political, more concerned with the poetics of language than its archival abilities. And yet it is the novel I return to again and again because it holds literature accountable for social change in a real way by demanding: What are the ethical responsibilities of narrative? Nine years later and counting, did all this happen, just so we might write about it? All this?

Or is there something more being asked of us?

 

 

Photograph © wikiphotographer

The post Best Book of 2013: <br>The Crocodiles appeared first on Granta Magazine.

In mid-twentieth-century Britain, there was a whole literary movement devoted to the end of the world: the Apocalypse Poets were a group of British writers inspired by Surrealism, and their work is awash with nightmarish images of war and chaos. But poets ranging far and wide have addressed the idea […]

The post The End of the World: The Best Poems about Apocalypse appeared first on Interesting Literature.

Here are five lessons for writers from A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. This novel has inspired several films and holiday specials, but it also offers many insights to writers. This post includes spoilers.

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On December 19, 1843, Chapman & Hall published a new novella by Charles Dickens that would sell out within the week and go on to become one of the most popular stories in the English language that has inspired several adaptations in plays, movies, and television. That novella was titled A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas.—or more commonly (and simply) A Christmas Carol.

It tells the tale of a man named Ebenezer Scrooge, who feels no love or joy in his heart and does not believe in Christmas, its traditions, or the feelings it stirs up in his fellow men and women. On Christmas Eve, he’s visited by the ghost of his former partner Jacob Marley, who is eternally tortured in his death by his uncaring attitude during life. He warns that Scrooge’s path leads to an even worse fate. But Marley has procured Scrooge a hope of avoiding that fate…by being haunted by three spirits.

These spirits teach Scrooge a great deal about life, and A Christmas Carol has much to teach writers about storytelling.

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Have an amazing story idea, but need to learn the basics of how to write a book? Creating a story that is dynamic and engaging takes a lot more than just setting aside an hour every day to write. This workshop will take you through all of the basics of writing a novel including how important it is to choose a great setting, how to build characters, what point of view you should choose, how to write great dialogue, and more!

Click to continue.

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5 Lessons for Writers From A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

I’ve read A Christmas Carol a few times during my life. Recently, I read it with an eye toward lessons writers can learn from Charles Dickens’ classic Christmas ghost story.

1. Write a catchy opening. A good way to hook readers is with a catchy opening, and A Christmas Carol has that: “Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.” Beginning a story in such a way is sure to make readers question who is Marley, why is he dead, and what does it mean for this particular story? Since the first chapter (or stave) is titled “Marley’s Ghost,” Dickens probably felt compelled to hammer home this point from the beginning, “Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.”
2. Give your characters a memorable tic or catchphrase. Giving your characters a memorable tic or catchphrase helps make them more real. For Ebenezer Scrooge, the star of A Christmas Carol, Dickens bestowed, “Humbug!” Most people, whether they’re fans of A Christmas Carol or not, know that “humbug” is a term used by Ebenezer Scrooge, but why? Maybe because Dickens has Scrooge exclaim the word five times in the first 22 pages of the story. Then, on page 28, the final paragraph of the first chapter, Scrooge closes the window to his room after Marley departs and “tried to say ‘Humbug!’ but stopped at the first syllable.” The word is only mentioned once more in the story, on page 81, when his nephew recounts how Scrooge claimed Christmas was a humbug the previous day.
3. Build a proper structure for your story. There’s a reason why Shakespeare’s plays all have five acts; it’s because a common structure helps an audience know what to expect from a story. Coincidentally, A Christmas Carol is broken into five chapters (that Dickens calls “staves”): “Marley’s Ghost,” “The First of the Three Spirits,” “The Second of the Three Spirits,” “The Last of the Spirits,” and “The End of It.” The first chapter shows Scrooge as a miserable miser; the second examines his past; the third looks at the present; the fourth identifies a possible future; and the fifth chronicles a changed man. The structure is simple and very effective, which is why it’s still how every adaptation since continues to tell the tale.
4. The story is told in a day. I should say the story is told in a day—and a lifetime. If you look at the “real” time of the story; it starts on Christmas Eve and ends on Christmas Day. But, with the assistance of Marley’s three spirits, the story also peers into the past and the future. It’s a clever bit of storytelling that makes the story immediate and deep at the same time.
5. Scrooge has a compelling character arc. It would be one thing to tell a story in which a mean, old guy is visited by ghosts and continues to be mean—or even dies after seeing the error of his ways. What makes A Christmas Carol a classic story is that Scrooge’s essential character changes during the story. In the beginning, he’s mean-spirited; in the end, he’s filled with love for his fellow men and women and the spirit of Christmas itself. Readers love stories in which a character starts off bad and turns good, or in which a coward does something brave, or in which a cold character displays a great deal of warmth.

The post 5 Lessons for Writers From A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens by Robert Lee Brewer appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Is it email or e-mail? We cover this and more in this edition of Grammar Rules.

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It’s been a while since we’ve addressed whether to use email or e-mail (click here to see our views on the subject back in 2011). Our views have shifted, and we’re prepared to pick a winning spelling for today and in the future.

(Click here to learn the difference between same and similar.)

If you read the magazine and website, you probably already know which way we lean.

Email vs. E-mail

E-mail used to be the way we referred to electronic mail, and Writer’s Digest used the hyphen as part of our actual style guide. As we were first entering the digital revolution, it made sense to hyphenate everything with an “e”: e-mail, e-book, e-commerce. But that’s when we thought “electronic”-(insert previously non-electronic thing here).

Email is still electronic mail, but we don’t think of it that way anymore. Email is just email, which is different than a text or message or chat or post. We’ve adjusted our style guide, and it’s consistent with both the AP and Chicago style guidelines.

Whenever AP and Chicago can agree on a style guideline, I’m more inclined to agree as well. So drop those hyphens and use email. The style may change again in the future, but for now, a consensus is forming.

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Learn more in the online course, Grammar and Mechanics, from Writer’s Digest University:

The post Email vs. E-mail (Grammar Rules) by Robert Lee Brewer appeared first on Writer's Digest.

The 1930s was a decade when poetry became more political, in the hands of left-wing poets like W. H. Auden; when modernist poetry went into new directions, thanks to Americans like William Carlos Williams; and when poetry became more technological, as the ‘Pylon Poets’ attest. Below, we introduce some of […]

The post The Best Poems of the 1930s appeared first on Interesting Literature.