The Fictionable podcast heads for Tel Aviv, where Etgar Keret talks about the mystery of translation, the surrealism of technology and surprising himself with his own fiction. The sudden reverses in stories like Point of No Return are rarely planned in from the start, Keret explains, but emerge as he writes – an impulse towards instability he attributes to his upbringing as the child of two Holocaust survivors.Lucy Caldwell tells us how she built her story Katherine Mansfield's Cat by weaving the New Zealander’s words with her own, and how the mystical connection she feels with the pioneering Modernist makes the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. Michael Donkor says he didn't set out to épater les bourgeois with his strikingly intimate story of a three-way relationship, Invitation, while Adaora Raji reflects on how the Biafran war she returns to in her story The Proper Way to Cook Oha still feels like a "continuous present tense" more than fifty years later. And Serena Katt explains how her graphic story Submerged rose up from something that happened to her – an experience that is all the more shocking because it is so everyday. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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