Roberto Bolaño: “Mexican Manifesto” Laura and I did not make love that afternoon.
In truth, we gave it a shot, but it just didn’t happen. Or, at least, that’s what I thought at the time. Now I’m not so sure. We probably did make love. That’s what Laura said, and while we were at it she introduced me to the world of public baths, which from then on, and for a very long time, I would associate with pleasure and play. The boy who worked at Montezuma’s Gym was an orphan, and that was his primary topic of conversation. In every public bath, there tends to be a fight from time to time.
The saunas, though it might be more precise to call them private rooms, were a set of two tiny chambers connected by a glass door. One day I’ll wander around in here, Laura said. Together, riding a Benelli—they were everywhere then—we attempted to visit all the baths in Mexico City, guided by an absolute eagerness that was a combination of love and play. The baths were most crowded at seven, seven-thirty, eight at night. Time passed. Rachel Kushner, Author of ‘The Flamethrowers’ Photo LOS ANGELES — On a recent morning the novelist Rachel Kushner stood in the parking garage of the Petersen Automotive Museum, where the Green Monster, a lean, turbo-jet-powered vehicle used to set land speed records, was displayed in a roped-off corner.
In her new, rapturously reviewed novel, “The Flamethrowers,” set in the 1970s, the narrator finds herself driving just such a vehicle on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, where those records are set. How outlandish is it to put a ’70s female character in a speed machine designed to go 500 miles an hour? “I based that scene on something that actually happened in 1965,” Ms. Kushner said. It’s the same speed and the same record achieved by Ms. Granta's 'Best Of Young British Novelists' Shows A 'Disunited Kingdom' : The Two-Way.
Once every decade, the literary magazine Granta publishes an issue called "Best of Young British Novelists," with short excerpts from the novels of 20 emerging authors.
In the past, the list of names has proved unusually prescient, with authors such as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Zadie Smith featured before they were widely read. So the release of the fourth list Monday afternoon is accompanied by, as Granta editor John Freeman writes in his introduction to the issue, "the newspapery whiff of zeitgeist prediction. " If the list is an accurate bellwether for the direction British fiction is taking, then it provides hope that the model of an insular and class-based literary community in Britain is beginning to fade. As Freeman wrote in an email, "the literary community used to feel like a club. Many of the writers in the 1983 issue knew each other well, went to university together even. Granta is filled with eclectic, lovely voices. Naomi Alderman Tahmima Anam Ned Beauman Jenni Fagan.
Lydia Davis. Lydia Davis is an American writer who was born in Massachusetts in 1947 and is now a professor of creative writing at the University at Albany, the capital of New York state.
She is best known for two contrasting accomplishments: translating from the French, to great acclaim, Marcel Proust’s complex Du Côté de Chez Swann (Swann’s Way) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and writing short stories, a number of them among the shortest stories ever written. Much of her fiction may be seen under the aspect of philosophy or poetry or short story, and even the longer creations may be as succinct as two or three pages. She has been described by the critic, James Wood in his latest collection, The Fun Stuff and Other Essays, as “a tempestuous Thomas Bernhard”.
Contemporary Writers in the UK - Contemporary Writers. Granta's "Best Young British Novelists" Women’s Fiction 2013 Shortlist. Book News: Lydia Davis Wins Man Booker International Prize : The Two-Way.