Litro141 teaser

Featuring Sam Mills Hari Kunzru Louise Palfreyman Armel Dagorn Bethany W. Pope Ruth Brandt Francoise Harvey Andrea Calabretta

May 2015

Litro Magazine 44

www.litro.co.uk

ISBN 978-0-9554245-5-7

15 May —14 Jun

0844 826 4242 openairtheatre.com

by arrangement with Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity Recommended for Ages 9+

19 Jun —11 Jul

16 Jul—29 Aug

May 2015

Litro Magazine 1

design:feastcreative.com

03 Sep —12 Sep

Issue 141 • Myths & Legends • May 2015

CONTRIBUTORS07 EDITOR’S LETTER09 ANDROMEDA10

Finding heroes in strange places

CALYPSO IN THERAPY16 An immortal endures eternity

ON A SHIP BOUND FOR CRETE21 Contemplating the nature of evil

THE TIKBALANG22

An encounter with Philippine folklore

PETRIFICATION26

Friendship in an ancient land

FEATHER-FOOTED KIDS30

The Litro & IGGY Young Writers Prize winner, 2015

FIMBULWINTER33

Seeking refuge in the old stories

LAND OF FIRE AND ICE37

Discovering a literary paradise in Iceland

HARI KUNZRU39

AUTHOR Q&A The author of Gods Without Men discusses myths, UFOs, and the future of literature

The University for World-Class Professionals

MA Creative Writing • Novel • Poetry • Writing for Children & Young Adults

MA English Studies with specialist pathways available in: • Contemporary Literature & Film • The Gothic Online distance learning available for MA Creative Writing and MA English Studies – The Gothic pathway Find out more: mmu.ac.uk/hlss/postgrad/lit Or email: postgradenglish@mmu.ac.uk Visit our Postgraduate Fair on Wednesday 3 June 3-6pm

May 2015 Faculty of Humanities, Languages & Social Science

Litro Magazine 3

Editor-in-Chief Eric Akoto Online Editor

online@litro.co.uk

Editorial Manager & Fiction Editor Dan Coxon dan.coxon@litro.co.uk

Book Reviews Editor Jennifer Wade & Yosola Olorunshola reviews@litro.co.uk Arts Editor Daniel Janes arts@litro.co.uk

Contributing Editors at large Sophie Lewis, Rio, Brazil Lead Designer Laura Hannum Marketing & Sales info@litro.co.uk

General inquiries: contact info@litro.co.uk or call 020 3371 9971.

1- 15 Cremer Street, Studio 21.3 London E2 8HD Litro Magazine believes literary magazines should not just be targeted at writers themselves, or even those with a particular interest in literature, instead Litro believes in reaching the general reader whether they be a commuter, someone browsing in bookshop or in a bar or cafĂŠ to meet a friend.

SC H AV O FU AI LA LL LA R S BL HI E PS

Master’s in Philosophy AND ITS USES TODAY PROFESSOR ROGER SCRUTON FBA

October 2015 – September 2016 A one-year, London-based programme of ten evening seminars and individual research led by Professor Roger Scruton, offering examples of contemporary thinking about the perennial questions, and including lectures by internationally acclaimed philosophers.

Seminar-speakers for 2015/16 include: • Roger Scruton • Sebastian Gardner • Simon Blackburn • Raymond Tallis Each seminar takes place in central London and is followed by a dinner during which participants can engage in discussion with the speaker.

The topics to be considered include consciousness, emotion, justice, art, God,

love and the environment. Examination will be by a research dissertation on an approved philosophical topic chosen by the student, of around 20,000 words. Guidance and personal supervision will be provided.

Others who wish to attend the seminars and dinners without undertaking an MA dissertation can join the Programme at a reduced fee as Associate Students.

Course enquiries and applications: Ms Claire Prendergast T: 01280 820204 E: claire.prendergast@buckingham.ac.uk

THE UNIVERSITY OF

BUCKINGHAM

LONDON PROGRAMMES

May 2015

Litro Magazine The University of Buckingham is ranked in the élite top sixteen of the 120 British Universities: 5 The Guardian Universities League Table 2012-13

Have you ever had anything published?

If you’ve written a book or had an article published, the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society (ALCS) could be holding money owed to you.

ALCS collects secondary royalties earned from a number of sources including the photocopying and scanning of books.

Unlock more information about how you could benefit by visiting www.alcs.co.uk May 2015

Litro Magazine 6

Contributors Litro Magazine • Issue 141 • Myths & Legends • May 2015

Louise Palfreyman

Hari Kunzru Born in London, Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist (2002), Transmission (2004), My Revolutions (2007) and Gods Without Men (2011) as well as a short story collection, Noise (2006) and a novella, Memory Palace (2013). In 2003 Granta named him one of its twenty best young British novelists. His short stories and essays have appeared in diverse publications including The New York Times, New Yorker, Guardian, London Review of Books, Granta, Book Forum and Frieze. He lives in New York City.

Sam Mills Sam Mills is the author of The Quiddity of Will Self (Corsair), a novel which aims to be the literary equivalent of Being John Malkovich, with Will Self as the centre of fascination.

Armel Dagorn

Louise Palfreyman lives in Birmingham where she works as a copywriter and editor. She has been published in Best British Short Stories 2014, The View from Here, The London School of Liberal Arts, Hypertext Magazine (USA).

Armel Dagorn’s writing has appeared and is forthcoming in magazine’s such as The String Fly, The Rialto and tin house.

And he is currently working on a novel’.

Ruth Brandt

Bethany W. Pope Bethany W Pope is an LBA winning author and a finalist for the FaulknerWisdom Awards, the Cinnamon Press Novel competition, and the Ink, Sweat and Tears poetry commission. Her first novel, Masque, shall be published

by Seren in 2016.

Ruth Brandt is studying the MFA in Creative Writing at Kingston University.

She lives in Surrey with her two sons and is currently working on a novel.

Andrea Calabretta is a writer and editor based in Philadelphia whose curiosity about the world has taken her to five continents.

Andrea Calabretta

Francoise Harvey Francoise Harvey writes short stories and poems, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bare Fiction Magazine, Synaesthesia Magazine, Furies (an anthology published by For Books’ Sake) and Agenda.

Litro Magazine • Issue 141 • Myths & Legends • May 2015 EDITORIAL Dear Reader, There’s something timeless about the best stories. While societies grow and history marches forever onwards, human nature hasn’t changed much over the centuries.

It’s little wonder that we’re still fascinated by tales of Odysseus and Penelope, Odin and Loki. They may be immortal, but the gods of myth and legend are often just as human as you and I.

With The Tikbalang we start to move in a different direction, as Bethany W. Pope mines Philippine mythology for a truly unique—and disturbing—monster. Then Ruth Brandt transports us to Iceland with Petrification, a modern romance that is constantly overshadowed by the stark landscape it takes place in—and the local legend of a family of petrified trolls. In our final short story, Francoise Harvey’s Fimbulwinter, two ostracized children find comfort in a book of Viking legends. Her story stands testament to the timeless power of myths and legends to inspire us— and to the power of books.

Litro #141—Myths & Legends—pulls out its crystal ball and scries the fate of these ancient gods in the modern world. We have contemporary takes on the tales of Ancient Greece, Northern European myths influencing the here and now, and even a folkloric monster from the Philippines. What they all have in common is that they explore one of the most timeless literary traditions of all, bringing gods and monsters to life in the 21st century—and maybe creating a few new myths of their own.

In this issue we also have a travel piece from Andrea Calabretta, Land of Fire and Ice, as she uncovers a rich tradition of storytelling in Iceland. And finally we have an interview with Hari Kunzru, author of Gods Without Men and Transmission, in which he discusses how ancient coyote myths found their way into his work, the modern mythology of UFO culture, and the multimedia future of the novel.

Sam Mills opens the issue with Andromeda, a retelling of one of the most enduring Greek myths. Steeped in tradition and yet shockingly modern, it’s a story that sets out our stall for this issue. The heroes and monsters of legend have never looked more relevant. It’s followed by Louise Palfreyman’s Calypso in Therapy, which projects a Greek immortal into today’s medical system. Funny and sad in equal measure, her tale resonates across the centuries. The same can be said of Armel Dagorn’s On a Ship Bound for Crete, a slice of flash fiction that questions exactly who the monsters were in Ancient Greece.

If Litro #141 shows us anything, it’s that the oldest of stories are just as relevant today as they were centuries ago. From Ancient Greece to the snowy wastes of Iceland, modern culture has its roots firmly planted in the myths and legends that seeded our imagination.

Maybe there really are immortals after all.

Dan Coxon, EDITOR

May 2015

Litro Magazine 9

ANDROMEDA Finding heroes in strange places

by Sam Mills

Andromeda

waves her rust-caked chains and screams up at the sky. She imagines her pleas, carried by the wind and spiced with sea-salt, flung into the town, the market place, the windows of houses and the church. Sometimes she even bleats like a goat, though she doubts the townsfolk appreciate the satire. They probably imagine that 48 days on a rock has shattered her mind. Apparently there are small clay likenesses of her for sale in the marketplace; some take them home and eye them furtively, others feel protected by her presence on their sill. Trouble—which might slap at any time, depending on the whim of the gods and the patterning of the stars—has been localised and caged and is no longer looking for fresh flesh.

The blue waters at her feet break and a dark shape emerges. Up rears Ketos the sea monster.

He is stoned again. She can see it in the whites of his eyes, which are blurry, as though filmed with green smoke. His roar is so unconvincing that even a passing shoal of fish continue on their path; their buoyancy seems an intended sarcasm. Ketos does nothing because when Ketos is stoned he talks about everything being connected, as though he is regurgitating a watery version of Heraclitus.

Andromeda flings a rock at him. It bounces off his nose, plops back into the ocean. The fish scatter into a firework of cerise and gold.

With a limp flick of his tail, he makes a sulky descent back into the ocean.

She slumps back down onto her rock, on a cushion of dried moss that she fashioned herself.

The branches of an ebony tree growing out of the cliff provide a dappled shelter. She examines her body, seeking metamorphosis. Her breasts are stained with sunburn and when she combs her bush with her fingers, it seems an inch longer. Her toenails are dirty; she dips them into the water. Before her imprisonment, she often glanced down at the ocean from the cliffs above her (how curious to think she stood there, in such happiness and innocence, unaware of how her future self would be chained to their rocky sides!) and considered the stillness of the waves. Now she no longer sees the ocean as a calm entity. She watches their bustle: the swim of the sea-thrushes, the flick of the thynnis and tritomus, diving xiphias, drifting pelamis, pinnotheres scuttling with their crampy claws, the batrachus blotted and whiskered, scarus bright as birds against the dull turbot and orcynus: busier than the market place on a Friday. Every creature seems to act with such purpose and fierce intent, exacerbating her sense of aimlessness. Sometimes the salt crystals on her skin glitter as though she is acquiring scales, or her bush looks dank and green-seeped like seaweed. Becoming a monster feels like a boon compared to her deepest fear: that she is becoming abstract, as though one day her body will lose its boundaries, slop into the ocean and her quiddity will become loose and liquid, drift into the horizon, lost and forgotten forever.

May 2015

Litro Magazine 10

CALYPSO IN THERAPY An immortal endures eternity

by Louise Palfreyman “You are cruel, you gods, and quickest to envy. It afflicts your hearts that a goddess should take a mortal to her bed. I did vow to make him deathless and never grow crooked, or worn with age. But let him go. Let him sail the restless sea…”

Homer, The Odyssey, Book V

Session One—a private counselling service, Moseley, Birmingham —

Not long after he left, I moved house and sold all my possessions

—

That seems a little drastic…would you like to explain?

—

He went back to his wife and son. I spent the first few months in a blur. Then I got tired of myself, and decided to make a fresh go of things. I thought it would be like the shedding of a skin. I thought that if I moved out, got rid of all the furniture, all the things that reminded me of him, that I would be able to start again.

—

I’m interested in the fact that you sold all your possessions, rather than all the things he gave you…

—

He didn’t give me anything.

—

Ah. I see.

—

Nothing at all, actually, come to think of it.

—

The bastard!

—

Are you supposed to say that?

—

Sorry. So why did your possessions remind you of him? Surely these were things you bought before your relationship with…with…

— Odysseus.

—

Yes. Odysseus. So, why?

—

Everything reminded me of him. If I wore a certain jumper, it reminded me of the last time I wore that jumper with him.

—

You got rid of your clothes too?

— Yes. — Right.

May 2015

Litro Magazine 16

ON A SHIP BOUND FOR CRETE Contemplating the nature of evil

by Armel Dagorn

There

are ten of us in here. No son of doctors, no daughter of senators, funnily. I’ve come to terms with it: the draw was as rigged as this ship’s mast is. We avoid each other’s eyes, pick at threads on our tunics as if these could save our lives. Except nothing can, and nothing will save next year’s ten or the following year’s, not until all citizens stop sighing in relief when their name doesn’t come up but cry instead at the horror of Athens sending her children to be devoured over the sea.

Each year, once the sacrifice is dispatched, crammed into the stinky hold like goats brought to the mainland from Salamis, citizens speculate on the nature of the evil. It has horns, you might hear. Taller than the tallest man you’ve ever seen. Roams the castle naked, hunts the poor condemned souls through endless corridors, snaps their necks and chews them up between its bovine teeth as if Athenian bodies were straw. But this isn’t the evil that haunts me most. My real enemy has thousands of heads, spits not fire but grateful prayers for not being me.

If some angel sneaked me a sword to fight free, I don’t know which way I’d thrust it first: at the monster feeding on my countrymen, or at my countrymen feeding the monster me.

May 2015

Litro Magazine 21

THE TIKBALANG An encounter with Philippine folklore

by Bethany W. Pope

Maria

only went to fetch some water. She meant no harm. Her mother was struggling in her labour; the baby was too large to part her small hips. She strained and sweated on her woven sleeping mat as the infant tried to struggle free; her long, blue-black hair plastered onto her forehead with water and salt.

Maria’s grandmother said, “Listen to me. There is a spring whose waters are good for easing the passage of the baby through the bone-cage. Follow the North path out of the barrio and go two miles past the largest mango tree. The forest-people live there, and there are ghosts, but they should not trouble you. The spring you’re seeking wells up between two large banyan trees that are always in flower. The spring itself is in a stone grotto, like the home of the Virgin. The water looks like gold. You will know it on sight.”

The old woman handed Maria a small, weathered Coke bottle with a twist of rag for a cork.

Maria slipped it safe into the front pocket of her flower-print dress.

The old woman patted her shoulder, “Hurry, child.”

“Yes Nanai,” she said, and walked out the door.

Maria’s house stood at the very edge of the village, one more palm-hut roofed with corrugated slabs of iron that had turned brown in the acid rain that blew in from the city. Her family was not poor. They were not wealthy enough to afford electricity or cinderblock walls, but they had a lot of livestock, two outfits each, and they never went a day without food. Maria went to school, and did well there, even though she had to learn her lessons in English; a language foreign to her.

The deep, dark forest is the same everywhere on earth. Here, in Luzon, it loomed, black and impenetrable, just outside Maria’s door.

Maria hurried along the path her grandmother set her upon; the road seemed to glow with white dust, even beneath a canopy of green that closed out the sun and dropped the temperature a full ten degrees. She saw a few snakes, drinking in the warmth of the white chalky road, but they did not trouble her. She heard a few screams; a troop of monkeys, hardly worth noticing.

In a few minutes, Maria reached the large mango. It stood thirty feet tall and its branches were hung with huge globes of ripe red-gold fruit. A few had fallen to the earth and, since they were nearly perfect (and she couldn’t reach the better ones) she slipped one into her pocket with the empty glass bottle. The other fruit was larger, but it had a bruise near the stem, so she started eating it right away. She didn’t want the juice to seep into her schooldress; it had just been washed, if she stained it now she would attract flies for a week and have to live with the smell of spoilt fruit.

May 2015

Litro Magazine 22

PETRIFICATION Friendship in an ancient land

by Ruth Brandt Petrified night-trolls near Lake Ugly, 6th September 2014

The

night-troll children were fishing down by the lake, dragging in net after net of salmon. So entranced were they by their bountiful haul that they forgot to keep an eye on the night sky. As the first glimmers of dawn infused the darkness, the mother troll rushed out of her cave to call her children to safety, only to discover them petrified. While she stared in shock, the morning light sloped on up the hill to strike her and she became petrified too.

So there they are, lumps of stone, one large boulder at the top gazing down at the smaller ones stuck forever on the shore of Lake Ugly.

We were told that story on the first day when we had yet to learn each other’s names. *** Volcanically heated pool at Landmannaglaugar, 6th September 2014 She stands in her swimming costume, water up to mid-thigh, her hand raised as though shielding her eyes from the sun. Except I don’t remember the sun shining. I remember the wind later that night, strong enough to rattle the hut’s corrugated iron roof as we lay in columns in our sleeping bags, surrounded by gentle breaths and ferocious snores. And I remember the snow the following morning that drove into our ears and nostrils as we trudged our way through the rhyolite mountains, the most dramatic scenery in Iceland, had we been able to see it through the blizzard.

Her face is dark beneath the shadow of her hand so that if this were the only photo I had of her, I would have nothing to remind me of her features. Perhaps she is waving. At me?

At the group admiring the first person brave enough to get into the volcanic pool?

“Come on you lot,” she is saying. “It’s beautiful in here.”

I hadn’t expected the unevenness of the water’s heat or the softness of the mud which moulded itself round my weary feet.

That first night she slept three people away from me. I noticed where she lay and as I said good night to everyone in general, I was really only saying good night to her. *** View down from the top of a small volcano, 7th September 2014 The moss covering the sides of the volcano is ancient, grown from seeds blown on the wind from Europe. It takes for ever to re-form if disturbed, so it is important to step carefully.

From up here, the landscape is tri-coloured; green, black and grey; moss and lava. But at its moment of creation, the valley must have crackled and blazed orange and red, and sulphur must have poisoned this untainted air.

May 2015

Litro Magazine 26

FEATHER-FOOTED KIDS The Litro & IGGY Young Writers Prize winner, 2015

by Katherine Liu In youth we were thunder-bringing, earth-shaking, feather-footed kids. We lived in the suburbs, all those perfect houses in rows and all their perfectly manicured lawns, but sometimes when we were in the neighborhood park we’d pretend we were somewhere else, somewhere rural where the fields stretched for miles until the clouds dipped low and kissed the golden horizon.

That was us in those days, shoes off, barefoot, chasing the dragonflies clicking through the languor of summer: the heat, the dust, the salt dotting upper lips. Sometimes we would even fling our arms skywards, as if we were the dragonflies themselves—and in a way, I suppose we were.

I don’t know why I can’t recall those days very well. When I look back they all blend into one another, bumping and sliding along until it all seems to become an impressionist painting of watery blue. Blue like the robin’s eggs we found in a tree, I had to stand on my tippy toes, morning mud squelching through them as I struggled to peer into the nest. Blue like the billowing sky, like the benevolent sea which we never saw, like the color reflected onto our hair when I squinted until everything was colorful.

Or maybe the days blend into one another to become red. Not just any red, but the rusty red of flaking deck paint; picture baseball fields rising and filling the sky with the thunder of a thousand years. I don’t recall us playing baseball, ever. But it sounds poetic to say that sometimes I think about the red dust everywhere which we walked out from.

And we walked everywhere.

There was a creek behind the bushes in the park, and we used to swim in the calm part before the water crashed into toothed rocks a few dozen meters downstream. They fenced off that creek a few years after we graduated high school, when a girl’s body was dragged out, bleeding from her chest and between her legs. She wasn’t actually bleeding, of course, but she had been earlier. That was the summer when all the neighbors shut their screen doors, turned inwards. But in our days we hadn’t feared things like that.

We would all climb onto the boulder and jump. We peeled our shirts off—boys and girls alike—because we were all the same then. We were silver minnow fish darting through the clear water, drops crystalline on our lips.

And Marcia had this chicken coop in her backyard. Sometimes we would eat bowls of cherries, holding the seeds in our mouths until they were tawny-colored clean. Then we would spit the seeds onto the tin sides of the coop and listen to the impact buckle against the walls, then the chickens squawking on the inside. On days like that, Tom would take one of Marcia’s strawberry-blonde braids and take the end in his fingers and twirl the thin golden strands as if he were twirling cherry stems, swatting them across her face, across her eyes so she would blink and then her light eyelashes would flutter like butterfly kisses.

May 2015

Litro Magazine 30

FIMBULWINTER Seeking refuge in the old stories

by Francoise Harvey

The

girls are playing a game. The winner is whoever can stand on one foot for the longest; the loser will be ostracised. They are gathered by the granite and slate dry-wall of the playground, but one of the rules is that you can’t use the wall for balance. You can’t use anyone else for balance, either. If you are Mara, you should be grateful for being invited to play.

The other girls are talking: TV shows, who stole and ruined whose pen, the netball team. Their balance is wavering. Mara can see their lifted feet trembling for the ground and short bodies swaying as the conversation grows more animated. She doesn’t join in because conversation is distracting and once she is distracted she knows she will lose. She always loses and is banished to the cold shade of the picnic bench by the teachers’ lounge, where no one dares to approach her.

So she listens and tries not to shake with the chill and effort of standing so still. She watches her steamy breath roil into the air, worried that she’s breathing too much, too obviously. The key to not losing is not to be noticed, which is infuriating in itself. The minutes tick by. Talkative Catherine plants both feet on the ground in order to better illustrate, with waving hands, the story she’s telling. The other girls’ feet are hovering just shy of the gravel—here and there a toe is touching the solid earth, and eventually drifts down to leave its owner standing twofooted and straight. The game has been forgotten. Mara’s left foot is still hooked around her right knee. Her legs are aching. With relief, she lowers her foot to the ground, loosens her tense muscles.

“You lose,” says Jo. Mara jerks her foot up. Jo tilts her head and smirks. Queen, she dismisses her subject.

Mara steps back. The injustice rages in her belly and will not be calmed, sending heat up her chest into her face. Her hands are clenched. The other girls stand, angelic and one-legged, gazing at her. Cousins, sisters, friends, all of them village children, they purse their lips slightly, wrinkle their so-similar noses, and consider her as one might consider the carcass of an unfamiliar animal squashed by a passing car.

“I thought the game was over,” says Mara, shakily. “Catherine had her foot down.”

“No, she didn’t,” says Jo, calm and friendly. “She had it up the whole time. Off you go.”

Mara unclenches her hands with some effort and walks off to the bench. *** Mrs Bleakly stands on the other side of the playground, watching the girls. In their matching coats, bathed in frozen winter light with the rolling hills as a backdrop, they look like a Christmas card. They play so nicely, never a raised word. Except that one. Always hiding in a corner, she is.

May 2015

Litro Magazine 33

LAND OF FIRE AND ICE Discovering a literary paradise in Iceland

by Andrea Calabretta “The writer in Iceland is God,” says Hallgrimur Helgason, an Icelandic author speaking from the small screen affixed to the back of the airplane seat in front of mine. I am flying to Reykjavik, and passing the time by watching the short documentaries on the country presented by Iceland Air. I’ve been leafing through a magazine as well, only half paying attention. But now, as a writer myself and a traveller who sometimes picks destinations based on their literary history, I am transfixed.

“This is because of the literary tradition we have from the Sagas,” Helgason says. “Iceland is sort of a writer’s paradise.”

In my bag, I’ve got a copy of Jar City, a murder mystery by Arnaldur Indridason that is set in the capital city of Reykjavik. It was recommended to me by the clerk at an international bookstore I like to browse. But I’ve never read an Icelandic author before. This trip was inspired more by an interest in natural phenomena—the Blue Lagoon, the Aurora Borealis—than by literature.

I flip to the section on history in my guidebook, and as I skim through the country’s Viking origins to the present day, a sentence leaps out at me: Iceland publishes more books per capita than any other nation in the world. Suddenly, my expectations for this trip have shifted.

As I fish Jar City out of my bag, I know I will go in search of the literary treasures of this tiny island nation.

Early Icelandic literature can be divided into three kinds: the Eddas, Skaldic poetry, and the most famous branch—the Sagas. The Eddas were mostly mythological stories, while Skaldic poetry (composed by poets known as skalds) was composed to honour nobles and kings. The Sagas, by contrast, relate historic events, sometimes dressed up with fantastic or romantic elements. In Iceland, they are regarded as prose histories of the tenth—and eleventh-century Norse and Celtic inhabitants of the country. The style of the Sagas will be familiar to anyone who has read Beowulf—with plain prose that recounts the adventures of a central hero renowned for his bravery. The Sagas typically place emphasis on situating the individual within his noble lineage and pinpointing his inherited traits. So begins Egils Saga, believed to have been written by 13th-century poet and historian Snorri Sturluson: There was a man named Ulf, son of Bjalf, and Hallbera, daughter of Ulf the fearless; she was sister of Hallbjorn Half-giant in Hrafnista, and he the father of Kettle Hæing. Ulf was a man so tall and strong that none could match him, and in his youth he roved the seas…

The family trees can get a little complex. But that doesn’t keep people from reading them— evidently nearly every household owns a copy of the Sagas. I decide I’ll head to 15 Hverfisgotu Street, near Reykjavik’s waterfront, which I’m told is one of the best places to learn about Icelandic literary tradition. The Culture House has an exhibit that explores the perspective of Northern Europeans during the time period of the Sagas, which included the Viking Expansion, the settlement of Iceland and the other Atlantic islands, and the transition from paganism to Christianity. But most impressive are the actual medieval manuscripts on display. Scribes used May 2015

Litro Magazine 37

AUTHOR Q&A

The author of Gods Without Men discusses myths, UFOs, and the future of literature

with Hari Kunzru

Q1

You open Gods Without Men with a short chapter reimagining a coyote myth in a modern idiom, which sets the tone for much of the book. Did you set out to tackle desert myths in this way, or did it arise from your experiences?

Q2 The ‘alien’ passages also seem to be placing

I got interested in Coyote during the process of researching the book. I’d started reading about the Chemehuevi people who inhabited the Mojave (and are still to be found on the banks of the Colorado) and they tell many Coyote stories. Lewis Hyde’s wonderful book, The Trickster Makes This World, was also an influence. For me Coyote represents an opposing pole to all the Gods in the book—instead of the transcendental organizing principle, he’s immanent to the system, messing with the works, connecting things together in ways that are ‘illegitimate’. Coyote’s mistakes are creative.

He suffers the consequences. The trickster steals fire for humans from the realm of the Gods, an illegitimate connection that starts civilization. Coyote is all through the book, making things happen.

a modern spin on mythology, in the sense that alien sightings and alien abductions feel like a modern cultural myth. Do you see them in this way? Where do you think our fascination stems from?

UFO’s are indeed a modern mythology.

If you look at the first generation of contactees in the late 40’s and early 50’s, many of them had a prior engagement with Spiritualism.

Their UFO stories seem like earlier stories about angels and spirits, given a technological sheen. As the Cold War progressed, these stories became more complicated, and in some ways darker (abductions, etc.), a way for people to process hopes and anxieties about otherness. The UFO period is more or less over now, since other geopolitical issues have taken over, but there’s no reason there shouldn’t be another flowering. In the years before the First World War, as anxieties about aerial bombardment began, there was a spate of alien airship sightings. Before that, even, there were alien balloonists flying over Midwestern farms.

May 2015

Litro Magazine 39

1–27 June 2015

Join the Kingston Writing School and the British Council at our third annual International Creative Writing Summer School, this year in Athens and Thessaloniki. www.britishcouncil.gr/events/international-creative-writing-summer-school-2015 www.kingston.ac.uk/writing/

May 2015

Litro Magazine 41

May 2015

Litro Magazine 42

We lc omin g you to a new ga lle ry a t 62 r ue du fau bou rg S aint-HonorĂŠ , P a ris from th e 1 s t M arch 2 0 1 5

1000 m 2 and two levels of exhibition space dedicated to the showcasing of modern and contemporary art May 2015

Magazine 62, rue du faubourg Saint-HonorĂŠ 75008 Paris - T. +33Litro (0)1 42 96 39 00 - paris@operagallery.com - www.operagallery.com Open Monday to Saturday from 10 am 43to 7:30 pm, Sunday 11 am - 7 pm