Granta 147: 40th Birthday Special by Sigrid Rausing

Granta 147: 40th Birthday Special Reviews

• 
  Trudie

  It took me a stupid long time to get through this, my first literary magazine, but it was a worthwhile journey. Of course I selected the 40th birthday special edition which seems to be double the normal size, the range of authors drawing my eye : Jeanette Winterson, Hilary Mantel, Angela Carter, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Kazuo Ishiguro. All these titans delivered as you would expect but the best part of reading Granta is for the new delightful discoveries and for me that was Binyavanga Wainaima's ascerbic riposte How to write about Africa , Diana Athill on dealing with V.S Naipaul, Lindsey Hilsum's chilling piece of reportage from the Rwandan Genocide. Other odd little stories by Raymond Carver, Mary Gaitskill and Ved Mehta also wedged in my mind,( who was that crazy Kiltykins ? )
  A thoroughly worthwhile endeavour. I will be seeking out more Granta magazines in the future.
• 
  Nicky

  I would award 5* purely on the basis that I am so happy to have been introduced to Granta!
  Reading any literary magazine was a first for me and I’m glad I picked this up. Other reviews have said they feel the best pieces were possibly absent and while I can’t comment on that I felt there were many very strong selections that I will read again in the future. Considering I don’t read much non-fiction it surprised me how much I enjoyed those in particular by journalists.
  
  Personal standouts:
  Where is Kigali?
  A Coup
  Lost Cat
  Kiltykins
  Dreams for Hire
  His Roth
  Self-Consciousness
  The View from this End
  Tadpoles
• 
  Vartika

  I've always found literary magazines a gamble, but the prospect of reading the works of so many writers I admire—among them John Berger, Jeanette Winterson, Amitav Ghosh, Gabriel García Márquez, Edward Said, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Angela Carter, Raymond Carver, Hilary Mantel, and Kazuo Ishiguro—in a single volume made me grab a copy of this 40th Birthday Special of Granta on sight. I felt just a little shortchanged though, for despite the boldly-stated occasion that prompted it, the issue covers only 34 years of writing from between 1979 and 2013.
  
  Yet, what a rich collection: my favourites were the stories "All I Know about Gertrude Stein" and "Dreams for Hire" by Winterson and Márquez respectively, as well as the essay "The Zoo at Basel" by John Berger. All three are works by writers whose styles I prefer and whom I already held in the highest of regards, but then there were the tastebreakers: "Lost Cat" by Mary Gaitskill, whom I'd heard of but never read before; "Agnes of Iowa" by Lorrie Moore; "The Fall of Saigon" by James Fenton; and "Where is Kigali?"—an incredible, historically-grounded journalistic essay on the war and genocide in Rwanda—by Lindsey Hilsum.
  
  Of course, there were some stories and essays I couldn't care less about too, as there always are—in fact, I daresay, more than usual. But even so, I enjoyed the issue: Binyavanga Wainaina's "How to Write about Africa"—a critique of the magazine's special issue on the continent and broadly of most writing on and about it in general—more or less made up for the disappointing bits. The inclusion of Founding Editor Bill Buford's last editorial column added a nice touch, and it was great fun going through some of the things other well-known authors (such as Kingsley Amis) wrote in their correspondence with him, presented in their own hand or type.
  
  I enjoyed the artwork and photographs presented alongside the writing, and although I didn't mourn the fact that poetry was not included, I did feel the absence of the photo essays, which are usually one of my favourite parts of the magazine.
• 
  Neil

  This is Granta's fortieth anniversary issue: a selection of fiction and essays published in the magazine between 1979 and 2013.
  
  I'm going to leave to one side my slight confusion over why a 40th anniversary edition should only cover the first 34 years of the magazine.
  
  This is a star-studded compilation of selected writings from Granta magazine. Kazuo Ishiguro, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis, Jeanette Winterson: these are the names that stand out to me because of my personal tastes in reading, but others will build different lists from the 30 contributors.
  
  All of the contributions are interesting to read. They are organised chronologically and I think my favourites are bunched towards the end, perhaps especially the final three from Lydia Davis, Jeanette Winterson and Herta Mueller, and this may simply be an indicator of my preference for more modern writing (these final three are definitely more experimental than the preceding articles).
  
  One disappointment for me was the lack of photo essays (I am a photographer). The regular magazine always includes photo essays and it would be have been lovely if one or two of those could have made it into a 40th birthday celebration.
  
  I said I was going to leave it, but the fact that it stops at 2013 is actually OK for me as that is roughly when I started subscribing to the magazine, so this provides a sort of helicopter view of all the years I missed and I can see most of the later years by taking a book off my bookshelf.
• 
  Chris

  The fortieth anniversary issue of Granta is a “greatest hits” collection of writings from it’s pages. I was curious to peruse its contents because, as I’ve noted in other reviews of other issues of Granta, only in the last few years have I become a cover-to-cover reader of this quarterly book/magazine. I wanted to see which selections from preview volumes I had read and remembered reading. There were only a few selections I could recall clearly reading and that I remembered vividly. Foremost among them was Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How To Write About Africa”. The introduction tells us that Wainaina’s piece began as a cutting critique of Granta’s 1994 issue on Africa.
  That 1994 Africa volume. Somehow—some mailing error or subscription overlap—I had received 2 copies of it. I sent the second copy to a friend who had just begun an internship in Cote d’Ivoire. She was appalled at the tone of the stories. And history confirms her opinion and her erudition. I am wiser for it.
  After reading a few stories in the 40 Birthday Special, I began looking to my original volumes and reading, not only the story selected for the Birthday issue, but, at least, one other story, extending Granta’s Birthday and prolonging my celebration of this publication.
  
  And I haven’t finished the book...
  
  Now, I’ve finished. A final comment. I found that many of the selections chosen for the 40th anniversary special were not pieces that I would naturally stir my interest. This magazine, which publishes so much of interest to me, publishes so much more that too, is interesting to a wider audience. The pieces I’ve read over the years that I think are among the best writing I’ve read, are not, by the creators of themagazine, the best...
• 
  T P Kennedy

  One of my least enjoyed Grantas. While this is presented as a best of the best, I'd beg to differ. Most of the contributions left me cold and there's lots of travel writing included. Many of the entries seem experimental. It's probably down to personal taste with the anthology being rich in contributions from authors I don't particularly enjoy.
• 
  Bridget Bonaparte

  Excellent book to travel with! Overall excellent stuff in here, some misses as to be expected for me the travel writing just feels very dated and colonial but some really wonderful short stories and essays in here in particular by Todd ewan, Raymond carver, delillo, Marquez, Mary gaitskill, & lorrie Moore. Not enough women in the collection but I guess that’s what you get in a retrospective of the publishing history.
• 
  Praveen SR

  Granta's 40th birthday special edition was a good enough excuse to go back to a couple of old pieces I loved reading from worn out issues of the late 1980s and also many others from the past four decades I have never read. It has some remarkable pieces of the writing from Bill Bufford, the founding editor's last editorial in 1995 after long years of shepherding the magazine to the late Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina's tips on how to write about Africa, one short pieces ripping apart all the cliches that are associated with writings on Africa by outsiders.
  
  Yet, in the same collection, we have some classic pieces written by outsiders on conflict-ridden regions, with James Fenton's 'The Fall of Saigon' (on the last days of the Vietnam war), Lindsay Hilsum's 'Where is Kigali' (on the Rwandan genocide) and Bruce Chatwon's 'A Coup' on the attempted coup in Benin in 1977. But Wainanaina's writing somehow makes one reflect more on these pieces, like when we realise that Lindsay Hilsum was not even aware of whether her helper was a tutsi or hutu, until much later. She had seen him as a possible victim, while he very well could have been part of the attacking clan.
  
  Ryszard Kapuscinski's problem is of a different nature in 'The Snow in Ghana'. He struggles hard to draw an accurate picture about his own country to a village headman whom he meets one night in Ghana. "Where are your colonies located," asks the headman, when he tells him that he is from Poland. When he says that not every white country is a colonial power, the people there find it hard to believe. Kapuscinski realises how hard it is to convey anything about our native country to a stranger.
  
  Edward Said writes about his younger days with his sisters and his father's unsuccessful attempts to "correct" his posture into a more manly one, and the consequent punishments after failing at it. I have some vague memories of reading something about this from one of his books some years back. Philip Roth's memories about his father are starkly different though. In 'Summer after War', Kazuo Ishiguro writes about the relationship between a young boy and his grandfather, an artist who no longer draws. It intelligently, but slowly reveals the picture of an old man who realises that he has been caught on the wrong side of history. The story made me hope of a future in which one of the present-day sanghis is scared of his past getting discovered by his grandchild, in a future when sanghism would be considered a shame and a crime. Primo Levi's memories of the days in Nazi concentration camps have shocked the world, but in 'Tadpoles', he writes about his memories of a summer holiday, with some evocative visuals painted in words.
  
  A terrifying wave crashing into a beachside hotel in Havana, upturning cars and killing people, sets Gabriel Garcia Marquez on a train of thoughts on a woman he might have met sometime in the past, in 'Dreams for Hire'. He suspects that a woman who was found dead there was the same woman he met four decades ago in Vienna, a woman whose dreams had a power of premonition, and who used this power to move up in life. In 'The Zoo in Basel', John Berger is not just visiting a zoo. The piece could have been titled 'Ways of Seeing an ape', as the apes lead him to ruminate on evolution.
  
  Lorrie Moore, about whom I read first from The New Yorker, writes touchingly about what-could-have-beens and mid-life crises in 'Agnes of Iowa'. There is something that connects this story to Hilary Mantel's 'Nadine at forty', which is about stopped clocks, preserved past and all that. In 'Those Who Felt Differently', Ian Jack goes to the time when Diana died in an accident. He wonders about why many people were grieving so much and why the media was questioning her own family for not grieving as much as the public wanted. He pitches the ideas of 'recreational grieving' and 'grief lite'. And, this was a world before social media!
  
  Angela Carter's 'Cousins' weaves something fresh and exquisite around a familiar story and Mary Gaitskill made me wonder how so much could be written so movingly about a lost cat. Ved Mehta, long-time contributor for The New Yorker, is someone am reading for the first time. In 'Kiltykins', the visually challenged author writes about a difficult, wavering, roller-coaster ride of a relationship. "When I was seeing Kilty, the fact of my blindness was never mentioned, referred to, or alluded to," he begins...
  
  This is such a worthy collection to get a taste of all the classic granta issues of yore.
• 
  Andreia Marques

  Granta 56: Winter 1996 "But you can't be forgotten. They have written books, made films. They have interviewed everyone and recorded what they say. They have opened the camps and museums. You can go to see them. There is a whole room full of shoes. I have seen pictures of it. But I want us to forgotten. It is a great error to believe the Nazis lost the war. For us, you see, they won it, and they win it each they. Each day we re-enact, on ourselves, what was done to us. They are the Masters of our hours, and we each successive death will be a small victory. Each death will go to the wiping out of their triumph. " Hilary Mantel
• 
  Anne

  An enjoyable collection of stories and essays, all of which have been previously published in the literary magazine "Granta" over the past 40 years. I tend to ignore short pieces if I have a novel to gallop through, but now I am a bit bogged down in a (rather tedious) non-fiction book, so I have been enjoying this sampler as a 'palette cleanser'. The variety of work is wide and from many famous authors. There is also a lovely, snotty letter included from Kingsly Amis informing Granta that they couldn't afford his work.
• 
  Danny

  ook deze 40e verjaardag editie van Granta is top: Featuring...
  Angela Carter,Kazuo Ishiguro,Todd McEwen,Bruce Chatwin,James Fenton,Primo Levi,Amitav Ghosh
  Raymond Carver,Philip Roth,John Gregory Dunne,Ryszard Kapuscinski,Joy Williams,John Berger,Gabriel García Márquez,Bill Buford,Lindsey Hilsum,Lorrie Moore,Hilary Mantel,Ian Jack
  Edward Said,Diana Athill,Edmund White,Ved Mehta,Adrian Leftwich,Alexandra Fuller,Binyavanga Wainaina,Mary Gaitskill,Lydia Davis,Jeanette Winterson,Herta Müller
• 
  Peter J.

  Granta, I'm subscribed since inception.
  The greatest literary magazine, especially of "new" writing.
  
  Nr. 147... just one great story, the one by Bruce Chatwin "A coup" on the southern coast of West Africa. Right in the period that I travelled Burkina, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo and Benin by all kinds of public transport.
  
  Amazing reading, and yes I am a slow reader, the more so as I read various books in parallel.
• 
  Glenn Christmas

  If I could, I'd give this 4.5 stars. Some exceptionally good writing in this edition; has inspired purchases of short story collections from Raymond Carver and Lorrie Moore. Lindsey Hilsum's 'Where is Kigali' was also particularly gripping.
• 
  Phil Egan

  There was something intimidating about this book that meant I put off reading it for quite some time. Once I'd dived in I found an excellent collection worthy of five stars if original material, but not quite so as an anthology.
• 
  Yue

  Evensong by Todd McEwen
• 
  Roberto Iacobacci

  A wonderfully curated 40th anniversary edition. Every read was captivating. Well done.
• 
  Anna Alexander

  I normally inhale each issue of Granta when it arrives in my mailbox, but I took the time to savor this copy and appreciate the writing. This is a Granta I will read again.
• 
  Haleigh

  Like every Granta edition I read, some are amazing and some are not so great.
• 
  Saleha Irfan

  pretty iconic. enjoyed the pieces from Said, Ishiguro, Márquez among others.
• 
  Mythili

  Every piece in here is so, so, good. I read most of this last year but then lost momentum and put it aside. Finally finished the last handful of stories and now want to read them all all over again.
• 
  Paula

  Review to follow
• 
  Sabu Paul

  
  Most issues of Granta are like a curate’s egg. Some pieces are excellent; some so-so.
  (I remember reading a short story by Martin Amis where a dog is a narrator, which was so bad that I think they published it only because the author is a big name.)
  Also they carry excerpts from novels, which I usually give a miss; I’d rather read the whole thing.
  This, however, is a best-of compilation, and it’s very, very good.
  It’s got the best of writers, practically the who's who of the literary world (Marquez, Philip Roth, Promo Levi, Amitav Ghosh, Edward Said, Ved Mehta, Raymond Carver, Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Berger, Bruce Chatwin, James Fenton, etc.), and the reportage, travel and memoir pieces are excellent.
  Highly recommended.