Granta

And what we've noticed, things just build off of the magazine.

When I was working as a publicist at Granta, my job in part was to run international press campaigns for the mag, but also bring the magazine to life in strategic cities and with readerships and audiences.

And I'm kind of bringing that ethos here as well.

So we were always going to launch the magazine in London and I'm based in Berlin.

Yeah, so she, so she's in her 30s.

And so less than a decade ago, she was named one of the best young American novelists by Granta, which is, I had to look it up, it's a longstanding, highly prestigious literary magazine.

I'm sure you knew that-

Mm-hmm

He's the author of the novel The Book of Night Women, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award, and John Crowe's Devil, a New York Times Editor's Choice and a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

His short fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, Harper's, GQ, Granta, and the Caribbean Review of Books, and he's here today to talk about his first book since winning the Booker, one of the most anticipated releases of 2019, the first installment in his epic fantasy Dark Star trilogy entitled Black Leopard, Red Wolf.

Science fiction magazine and book publisher Tor says this of Black Leopard, Red Wolf.

If Charles R. Saunders' Imaro series opened the door to new ways of telling epic fantasy and N.K. Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy leapt over the threshold... then Marlon James' Black Leopard, Red Wolf just ripped the whole damn door off its hinges.

Foxhead 2012.

Her essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Granta, Vogue, The Paris Review, and Plowshares.

Her memoir of growing up in a family of artists, Our Friend Art, is forthcoming from Pushkin Press, US-UK in 2027.

Welcome to the podcast, Daisy.

So that kind of brings us to what was happening with my search for Ruth Gershon, because in the 18 months, two years or so I spent looking for essays that I mentioned earlier, I read Ruth's essay.

It was originally published in Granta in 1999.

And it's a a staggering essay that tells a personal history of growing up in Orthodox Jewish community in Northwest London in the 1960s and being a young woman in that environment and being devout and also loving sort of the dress of French cinema and trying to figure out which dress self is the one that feels like her, but also doing so within an environment where her father, with whom Ruth was very close, worked in schmatters in London's rag trade, and he dressed her and her mother and dressed them beautifully in fashionable, gorgeously made clothes that were from his business.

So the essay is also telling a social history of London's Jewish community and the rag trade, in that snapshot of time where laws were changed about selling ready-to-wear garments and there was an influx of lower quality goods that were imported into England troubling the existing industry, which was based in London and elsewhere, the rag trade.

yes for me it really um Yeah, it's sort of an all-encompassing essay that completely stands on its own as a piece of work.

So my task was, of course, to find Ruth Gershon.

And all that it said in Granta, in the bio, was that Ruth is a historian who lives in northwest London.

So I thought, okay, well, off I go.

We are joined today by Isabella Scott.

Based in London, Isabella's writing has been published in Granta, the Financial Times, and the London Review of Books.

She joins us today to discuss her debut, The Bed Trick, Sex and Deception on Trial.

Now, the case at the center of this book is, if not stranger than fiction, at least as strange as fiction can be.

He's both an investor and a writer.

He has, by the way, in Granta, an incredible, Short story that came out the other day.

Highly recommend it.

It's not my recommendation, but I highly, highly recommend it.

It's true.

I mean, uh, Thomas Meaney, the editor of, uh, Granta magazine, he wrote an article a few years back about a previous leader of the AfD, Frauke Petry, uh, who is now desperately trying to get back into the state parliament, um, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and is, uh, by all, by all, uh, measurements, uh, set to fail disastrously.

But, uh, he wrote an ar- he wrote a profile of her a few years ago where he, uh, wrote that she respected Germany's national moratorium on charisma, which I thought was, uh-

[chuckles]

William Dunlop was himself a poet.

He was a founding editor of Granta Magazine.

And he still had his English accent,

even though I met him in