Granta | The Magazine of New Writing

Granta 138: Journeys

What are the ethics of writing about a place you visit only briefly and view as an outsider? With Granta’s long tradition of travel writing in mind, we ask some of the world’s best writers: is travel writing dead?

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Granta 137

What leads us to accept a particular belief, credo or fact? What’s the difference between conviction, groupthink and madness? And when should we start asking questions? This issue looks at cults, faiths and ideologies, and asks how they turn us into followers.

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Granta 136: Legacies of Love

Love and pain, love and loss: the two are twinned. To know love is to...

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Granta 135: New Irish Writing

Ireland has one of the world’s most distinguished literary traditions. In this issue, we showcase...

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Granta 134: No Man’s Land

No man’s land is the ground between opposing forces. This issue tells us what happens...

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Granta 133: What Have We Done

In this issue, acclaimed nature writer Barry Lopez meditates on language and seeing; Australian writer...

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Granta 132: Possession

In this issue, Oliver Bullough travels to Ukraine and Crimea in the wake of revolution;...

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Granta 131: The Map Is Not the Territory

This issue of Granta is about the difference between the world as we see it...

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Granta 130: India

For a long time – too long – the mirror that India held to its...

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Granta 129: Fate

What is fate, in a culture of free will and self-determination? Where do we project...

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Granta 128: American Wild

American Wild: it can kill you, or exhilarate you. It’s always there, a character in...

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Granta 127: Japan

Everyone knows this country and no one knows it. Here are twenty new Japans by...

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Granta 126: do you remember

We are what we remember, and even when we invent, we write what we remember....

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Granta 125: After the War

How long is the shadow of a battle, an explosion, a revolution? What stories arise...

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Granta 124: Travel

From the Amazon to rural China, west Texas to the caves that lurk beneath the Peak District, this issue of Granta takes you out of your chair and out into the world. Haruki Murakami goes home to Kobe, Teju Cole meditates on danger in Lagos and Lina Wolff imagines a woman adrift in Madrid. Here are eighteen collisions between people and the places that have made them, shaped them and terrified them.

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Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4

Here, in a collection of new work by twenty writers, is the future of literature in Britain.

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Granta 122: Betrayal

Without love there can be no betrayal – love of a country, a brother, a...

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Granta 121: The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists

Brazil, the great Jorge Amado said, is not a country but a continent. In this...

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Granta 120: Medicine

This collection of new fiction, poetry, memoir and art showcases the work of doctors who are also...

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Granta 119: Britain

Broken Britain? This issue of Granta is a celebration of the nation’s past and present, its...

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Granta 118: Exit Strategies

In this issue John Barth contemplates the end of writing fiction. Alice Munro explores the...

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Granta 117: Horror

Horror is everywhere – in cinema, in fiction, in real life. In this issue Paul...

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Granta 116: Ten Years Later

A street vendor in Tunisia, an American marine going home and a signals operator on...

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Granta 115: The F Word

From Ghana to Great Britain, New Delhi to New York, the balance of power remains...

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Granta 114: Aliens

First there was the traveller; then the word was emigrants. In America, they turned into...

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Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists

From Borges to Bolaño, the Spanish language has given us some of the most beloved...

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Granta 112: Pakistan

Filled with almost 200 million people speaking nearly sixty languages, brought into nationhood under the...

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Granta 111: Going Back

We all go back: to the house or town where we were raised, to an...

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Granta 110: Sex

Sex is our oldest obsession. For as long as we’ve been doing it, it has...

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Granta 109: Work

Most of us spend more time at work than anywhere else, but are our lives...

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Granta 108: Chicago

A special issue celebrating Chicago, and featuring original work by Aleksander Hemon, Nelson Algren, Peter...

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Granta 107

Granta 107 features work by Kenzaburō Ōe, Mary Gaitksill, Mahmoud Darwish, Rupert Thomson, William T....

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Granta 106: New Fiction Special

Granta 106 is a special issue devoted to new fiction and includes work by Paul...

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Granta 105: Lost and Found

In this issue, we reflect on people and places undergoing momentous change. Jeremy Treglown investigates...

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Granta 104: Fathers

Granta 104, new editor Alex Clark’s first issue, goes in search of fathers. We find...

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Granta 103: The Rise of the British Jihad

At present, in Britain, there are at least 200 indigenous active terrorist cells being monitored...

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Granta 102: The New Nature Writing

As our conception and experience of nature changes, so too does the way we write...

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Granta 101

Granta 101 features incisive reportage and investigative journalism alongside new fiction and a photo essay...

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Granta 100

This celebratory 100th issue, guest-edited by novelist William Boyd, features contributions from many of Granta’s...

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Granta 99: What Happened Next

This issue of Granta is about storytelling – the stories we invent, the stories we...

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Granta 98: The Deep End

This issue of Granta is by people, and about people, whose experience of life suggests...

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Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists 2

Granta selects the ‘Best of Young American Novelists’, including Gary Shteyngart, Nicole Krauss, Anthony Doerr...

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Granta 96: War Zones

Wars change their nature, but states and people continue to pursue the ancient aims of...

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Granta 95: Loved Ones

In this issue of Granta, writers consider their relationships with those who were, or should...

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Granta 94: On the Road Again

Where travel writing went next with fiction from Michel Faber and Tessa Hadley, Tim Parks...

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Granta 93: God’s Own Countries

This issue of Granta explores the varieties of religious belief and their personal, social and...

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Granta 92: The View from Africa

Fresh voices from Africa, in all their differences, as well as memoir and reportage that...

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Granta 91: Wish You Were Here

This issue includes Simon Gray in Barbados, rocking in his pram, smoking, remembering Alan Bates; Saïd...

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Granta 90: Country Life

Country life: dispatches from what’s left of it. Featuring Robert Macfarlane, Barry Lopez and Kathleen...

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Granta 89: The Factory

Memoir, reportage and fiction including Isabel Hilton in a Chinese factory, Luc Sante on serving...

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Granta 88: Mothers

This issue of Granta includes Edmund White on his mother’s girdle, John McGahern on his...

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Granta 87: Jubilee

This special edition of Granta celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary with a rich collection of new...

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Granta 86: Film

This special issue of Granta is devoted to the cinema: its personalities and politics, movers...

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Granta 85: Hidden Histories

This issue of Granta excavates histories both personal and political: repressed memories, unexplored lives, forgotten...

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Granta 84: Over There: How America Sees the World

This issue of Granta excavates histories both personal and political: repressed memories, unexplored lives, forgotten...

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Granta 83: This Overheating World

This is issue of Granta explores what is happening to our planet and what we...

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Granta 82: Life’s Like That

An anthology of private memory, including Lynn Barber on her close encounter with bygamy, and...

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Granta 81: Best of Young British Novelists 2003

Who are the best of young British novelists? Five Granta judges read and deliberated. This...

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Granta 80: The Group

In this issue of Granta, writers take out their group photographs and remember the best...

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Granta 79: Celebrity

An issue devoted to the dubious rewards and strange effects of fame which successfully avoids...

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Granta 78: Bad Company

This issue of Granta introduced two young novelists, Jon McGregor and Gary Shteyngart, as well...

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Granta 77: What We Think of America

Is the US really so disliked? If so, why? In this issue twenty-four writers drawn...

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Granta 76: Music

This special issue of Granta is devoted to the making and meaning of music from...

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Granta 75: Brief Encounters

‘I was approached by a courteous young man who handed me a visiting card engraved...

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Granta 74: Confessions of a Middle-Aged Ecstasy Eater

‘Perhaps no truth is more momentous, as none more difficult to face, than the blackest,...

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Granta 73: Necessary Journeys

This issue of Granta is devoted to writing about the journeys we have to make....

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Granta 72: Overreachers

Why do we always want more? Why do we never give up? When do we...

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Granta 71: Shrinks

This issue of Granta is devoted to the kinks and twists of the human mind,...

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Granta 70: Australia: The New New World

This special issue of Granta is devoted to Australia, as it was and is, in...

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Granta 69: The Assassin

In a powerful piece of investigation, Henk van Woerden reconstructs the strange, affecting history of...

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Granta 68: Love Stories

This issue of Granta is dedicated to love, or more often the lack of it,...

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Granta 67: Women and Children First

How do we cope with the public and private disaster? Jasmina Tesanovic on being bombed...

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Granta 66: Truth + Lies

This issue includes the original exposé, by Elena Lappin, of Binjamin Wilomirski’s bogus Holocaust memoir...

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Granta 65: London: the lives of the city

‘Let us commend to you the London Granta . . . with a fabulously impressive...

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Granta 64: Russia: The Wild East

This issue contains the voices of a people who have suffered under (and coped with)...

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Granta 63: Beasts

What do they make of us, and how do they shape us? Paul Auster on...

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Granta 62: What Young Men Do

Two parlous states receive intimate examination in this issue: the first is marriage, the second...

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Granta 61: The Sea

We would not be without the sea. Without the sea, no clouds, no rain, no...

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Granta 60: Unbelievable

This is an issue about untimely ends and fateful escapes. With: Ariel Dorfman on surviving...

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Granta 59: France: The Outsider

What has happened to France – the universal nation, the tutor of the good life,...

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Granta 58: Ambition

The things we desire – love, money, wisdom, power – have not changed since the...

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Granta 57: India! The Golden Jubilee

A 288-page issue to mark India’s 50th year of independence. Fiction by Anita Desai, Amit...

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Granta 56: What Happened to Us?

This issue freezes the frame on Britain before the 1997 election: a country that has...

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Granta 55: Children: Blind, Bitter Happiness

What was it like to be that lost personality in a vanished time, a child?...

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Granta 54: Best of Young American Novelists

The twenty best American novelists under forty, chosen by Robert Stone, Anne Tyler, Tobias Wolff,...

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Granta 53: News: Scoops, Lies and Videotape

Who makes it? Who owns it? Should we believe it? With Phillip Knightley on his...

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Granta 52: Food: The Vital Stuff

Food as indulgence, certainly, but also food as a taboo, a cruelty, a desperate need,...

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Granta 51: Big Men (and L.A. Women)

Big as in substantial, powerful, famous; men as in weak, wicked, and notorious. Gitta Sereny...

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Granta 50: Fifty

In 1985, Granta published James Fenton’s extraordinary account of the fall of Saigon. Twenty years...

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Granta 49: Money

Get it, spend it. Save it, lose it. Risk it, win it. Lose it again,...

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Granta 48: Africa

Twelve writers describe the profound changes this continent is undergoing. With Lynda Schuster in Liberia...

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Granta 47: Losers

A hymn to unmitigated public humiliation. With Martin Amis on a writer who can’t write;...

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Granta 46: Crime

An issue devoted to criminal behavior, a testimony to deviance. James Ellroy on the dark,...

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Granta 45: Gazza Agonistes

Ian Hamilton’s story of soccer superstar Paul Gascoigne: at play, on show, in the press,...

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Granta 44: The Last Place on Earth

When the time comes – our appointment, our dark hour – what thoughts will we...

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Granta 43: Best of Young British Novelists

Granta 43 celebrates a new generation of twenty of the best new British writers. Selected...

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Granta 42: Krauts!

What is the new Germany? ‘Krauts!’ seeks the uncomfortable answer to this simple question. With...

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Granta 41: Biography

Is it merely a form of gossip (the affairs, the drinking, the public rows) or...

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Granta 40: The Womanizer

Richard Ford’s womanizer is an insistently ordinary man — until he goes abroad. Paul Theroux’s...

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Granta 39: The Body

Is it us or is it nothing more than the container of what we really...

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Granta 38: We’re So Happy!

Featuring the fictional début of Bill Morris, set in the design department of General Motors,...

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Granta 37: The Family

The controversial issue about the most important, powerful, and potentially destructive relationship of our lives....

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Granta 36: Vargas Llosa for President

The novelist’s personal account of his campaign for the presidency of Peru. Plus: Alvaro Vargas...

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Granta 35: The Unbearable Peace

John le Carré’s story about the Swiss, money, and democracy and about our own unbearable...

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Granta 34: Death of a Harvard Man

Simon Schama sets out to discover which story, if any story, is the story of...

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Granta 33: What Went Wrong?

The first chilling account of the darker side of Europe’s Revolution of 1989. William McPherson...

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Granta 32: History

An issue of stories, about the ways in which we make sense of the past....

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Granta 31: The General

Nobody has ever got through to the ‘General’ – General Alfredo Stroessner – who, until...

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Granta 30: New Europe!

The year 1989, annus mirabilis, was the most important year in Europe since the end...

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Granta 29: New World

Is it possible, by travelling to a new world, to become a new person? Jonathan...

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Granta 28: Birthday Special

A mad editorial tea-party celebrating Granta’s first ten years: John Simpson, Salman Rushdie, Ian Jack,...

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Granta 27: Death

A story becomes a story once it has an ending, and there is no ending...

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Granta 26: Travel

This travel issue is dedicated to the memory of Bruce Chatwin with four unpublished pieces...

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Granta 25: Murder

Martin Amis’s tale of Nicola Six, a girl who’s been trouble all her life. Plus:...

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Granta 24: Inside Intelligence

In 1946, at the age of twenty, Anthony Cavendish infiltrated a ring of arms traders...

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Granta 23: Home

Prague, Beirut, Des Moines, Derry, and the ugliest village in Essex. What is home for...

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Granta 22: With Your Tongue Down My Throat

Hanif Kureishi’s first novella: a tale of Nadia and Nina, of two sisters, two cities,...

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Granta 21: The Storyteller

Bruce Chatwin in the outback, Ryszard Kapuscinski carrying a coffin through the Polish ‘bush’, and...

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Granta 20: In Trouble Again

Redmond O’Hanlon in the Amazon jungle, Salman Rushdie in Nicaragua, Colin Thubron in China, Ryszard...

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Granta 19: More Dirt

The companion volume to ‘Dirty Realism’ (Granta 8): unillusioned, spare fiction of the belly-side of...

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Granta 18: The Snap Revolution

‘We had found our way, we realized, into the Marcoses’ private rooms. It seemed to...

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Granta 17: While Waiting for a War

‘I find myself in 1985 refreshing my memory of 1937 and 1938 in an old...

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Granta 16: Science

For the last thirty or forty years, it has been a commonplace that science and...

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Granta 15: The Fall of Saigon

Witty, bizarre, and verging on the lunatic – who in his right mind would gatecrash an...

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Granta 14: Autobiography

The Americans call photography an art. But what I’m doing is not art. How can...

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Granta 13: After the Revolution

The Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, China, Cuba…what has happened to the nineteenth-century dream of...

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Granta 12: The Rolling Stones

Stanely Booth was meant to be the authorised biographer of the Rolling Stones, but, shortly...

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Granta 11: Greetings from Prague

In November 1956, the director of the Hungarian News Agency, shortly before his office was...

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Granta 10: Travel Writing

One of the most popular issues of Granta, now in its fifth printing. Including Jonathan...

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Granta 9: John Berger, Boris

Boris: a story of love and pain and self-destruction. Also a chronicle of an obsession...

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Granta 8: Dirty Realism

The issue of Granta that defined a new school of American writers: Richard Ford, Jayne...

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Granta 7: Best of Young British Novelists

Who were the best young British novelists ten years ago? And who among them have...

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Granta 6: A Literature for Politics

This special, double issue of Granta is organized to fill a gap, a felt emptiness...

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Granta 5: The Modern Common Wind

The theme of this issue is the habitability of the earth, and it is in...

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Granta 4: Beyond the Crisis

In this issue, arguments for the future of publishing by Brigid Brophy, John Sutherland, David...

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Granta 3: The End of the English Novel

Is it the end of the English novel? Has it grown predictable and unadventurous? Granta...

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Granta 2: The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.

In the second issue of Granta is a novella by George Steiner, short stories by John Barth, Robert Coover, Walter Abish and others, along with essays on contemporary fiction and poetry.

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Granta 1: New American Writing

The first issue of the new Granta collects work by some of the most accomplished...

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ALL ISSUES

ALL ISSUES

Granta 138: Journeys

Granta 137

Granta 136: Legacies of Love

Granta 135: New Irish Writing

Granta 134: No Man’s Land

Granta 133: What Have We Done

Granta 132: Possession

Granta 131: The Map Is Not the Territory

Granta 130: India

Granta 129: Fate

Granta 128: American Wild

Granta 127: Japan

Granta 126: do you remember

Granta 125: After the War

Granta 124: Travel

Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4

Granta 122: Betrayal

Granta 121: The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists

Granta 120: Medicine

Granta 119: Britain

Granta 118: Exit Strategies

Granta 117: Horror

Granta 116: Ten Years Later

Granta 115: The F Word

Granta 114: Aliens

Granta 113: The Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists

Granta 112: Pakistan

Granta 111: Going Back

Granta 110: Sex

Granta 109: Work

Granta 108: Chicago

Granta 107

Granta 106: New Fiction Special

Granta 105: Lost and Found

Granta 104: Fathers

Granta 103: The Rise of the British Jihad

Granta 102: The New Nature Writing

Granta 101

Granta 100

Granta 99: What Happened Next

Granta 98: The Deep End

Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists 2

Granta 96: War Zones

Granta 95: Loved Ones

Granta 94: On the Road Again

Granta 93: God’s Own Countries

Granta 92: The View from Africa

Granta 91: Wish You Were Here

Granta 90: Country Life

Granta 89: The Factory

Granta 88: Mothers

Granta 87: Jubilee

Granta 86: Film

Granta 85: Hidden Histories

Granta 84: Over There: How America Sees the World

Granta 83: This Overheating World

Granta 82: Life’s Like That

Granta 81: Best of Young British Novelists 2003

Granta 80: The Group

Granta 79: Celebrity

Granta 78: Bad Company

Granta 77: What We Think of America

Granta 76: Music

Granta 75: Brief Encounters

Granta 74: Confessions of a Middle-Aged Ecstasy Eater

Granta 73: Necessary Journeys

Granta 72: Overreachers

Granta 71: Shrinks

Granta 70: Australia: The New New World

Granta 69: The Assassin

Granta 68: Love Stories

Granta 67: Women and Children First

Granta 66: Truth + Lies

Granta 65: London: the lives of the city

Granta 64: Russia: The Wild East

Granta 63: Beasts

Granta 62: What Young Men Do

Granta 61: The Sea