Margins
Granta: The Magazine of New Writing book cover 1
Granta: The Magazine of New Writing book cover 2
Granta: The Magazine of New Writing book cover 3
Granta: The Magazine of New Writing
Series · 18
books · 1980-2023

Books in series

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#2

Granta 2

The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.

1990

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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#3

Granta 3

The End of the English Novel

1980

Is it the end of the English novel? Has it grown predictable and unadventurous? Granta 3 collects work from writers and critics which points to the fact that our terms have grown inadequate: it is the end of the English novel; but it is also the beginning – quite possibly an extremely important beginning – of British fiction. In this issue: Bill Buford: The End of the English Novel Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children Angela Carter: Cousins Desmond Hogan: Southern Birds Alan Sillitoe: A Scream of Toys Emma Tennant: Alice Fell Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker Lorna Sage: Invasion from Outsiders Chris Bigsby: The Uneasy Middleground of British Fiction Frederick Bowers: An Irrelevant Parochialism James Gindin: Taking Risks Christine Brooke-Rose: Where Do We Go From Here? J. K. Klavans: God, He Was Good
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#4

Granta 4

Beyond the Crisis

1981

In this issue, arguments for the future of publishing by Brigid Brophy, John Sutherland, David Caute, Blake Morrison, Per Gedin, David Godine and Walter Abish. Also, fiction from Martin Amis, Guy Davenport, Nicole Ward Jouve, Kenneth Bernard and Raymond Carver. Plus, an essay on realism and sexuality by Mario Vargas Llosa. In this issue: Guy Davenport: Fifty-Seven Views of Fujiyama Brigid Brophy: The Economics of Self-Censorship John Sutherland: The End of A Gentleman’s Profession David Caute: Sweat Shop Labour Blake Morrison: Poetry and The Poetry Business Per Gedin: A Hand-Made Art Erin Burns: Publishing In America: An Interview with David Godine Walter Abish: But Why Write? The Writer-To-Be Lisa Zeidner: Lucy Nicole Ward Jouve: The Drawer Martin Amis: Let Me Count the Times Kenneth Bernard: Sherry Fine: Conceptualist Raymond Carver: Vitamins Mario Vargas Llosa: La Orgía Perpetua An Essay on Sexuality and Realism Patricia Hampl: The Beauty Disease
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#9

Granta 9

John Berger: Boris

1983

Boris: a story of love and pain and self-destruction. Also a chronicle of an obsession with political and historical implications that extend far beyond its seemingly straightforward, spartan narrative. Plus Gabriel García Marquez on ‘The Solitude of Latin America’, with Mario Vargas Llosa and José Donoso.
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#12

Granta 12

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

1984

Item Granta Books, London, 1984. Paperback. Book Fine. First Edition. Paperback, a superb copy. Book # 3963a; The Magazine of New Writing; 0.6 x 8.2 x 5.8 Inches; 256 pages. Bookseller Inventory # 6202 Granta 12: The Rolling Stones was first published in Spring 1984. Granta 12: The Rolling Stones Stanely Booth was meant to be the authorised biographer of the Rolling Stones, but, shortly after he began writing in 1968, things started to go wrong. The American concert tour that he joined ended in murder at a race track in the Californian desert, and the time that followed - in which Booth was assaulted by Hell's Angels, beaten up by American soldiers, run over by a lorry, imprisoned, and subjected to epileptic fits while trying to withdraw from drugs - was characterised only be confusion, loss and disillusionment. Completed fifteen years after it was begun, 'The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones' is only in part about the group of musicians it depicts. It is also a social history and a confession - a chronicle, in the tradition of Michael Herr's Dispatches, of people united in a curious commitment to their own destruction.
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#17

Granta 17

Graham Greene: While Waiting for a War

1985

‘I find myself in 1985 refreshing my memory of 1937 and 1938 in an old commonplace book and very fragmentary diary. There are verses copied there which I must have chosen for their significance at these moments of my life: literary gossip, bizarre crimes and divorces wrenched from newspapers…and then suddenly the digging of trenches on Clapham Common.’ Plus Alice Munro, John Updike, Doris Lessing, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Marianne Wiggins.
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#18

Granta 18

The Snap Revolution

1986

‘We had found our way, we realized, into the Marcoses’ private rooms. It seemed to me that in every room I saw, practically on every available surface, there was a signed photograph of Nancy Reagan. But this can hardly be true. It just felt as if there was a lot of Nancy in evidence.’ Also in this issue: Seamus Deane, Primo Levi, David Hare, and John Berger.
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#39

Granta 39

The Body

1992

Book by
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#74

Granta Magazine 74

Confessions of a Middle-Aged Ecstasy Eater

2001

In the latest issue of the magazine that Vogue called “the pinnacle of literary and political writing,” a celebrated writer makes an anonymous confession and defends a habit: his son supplies him with Ecstasy. Nicholas Shakespeare discovers the evil of his ancestors, Alexander Stille examines the godlike role of poets in Somalia, and David Feuer writes on trying—and failing—to be a shrink in a Hasidic community. Also included is new fiction from A. M. Holmes and Judith Hermann.
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#91

Granta 91

Wish You Were Here

2005

The author of the celebrated and widely-acclaimed The Smoking Diaries, returns to print, with a tender, affecting, and of course funny account of his friendship with Alan Bates, written as he waits in Barbados for Harold Pinter to turn up.
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#112

Granta 112

Pakistan

2010

Packed with almost 200 million people speaking nearly sixty languages, brought into nationhood under the auspices of a single religion, but wracked with deep separatist fissures and the destabilizing forces of ongoing conflicts in Iran, Afghanistan and Kashmir, Pakistan is one of the most dynamic places in the world today. From the writers who are living outside the country - Daniyal Mueenuddin, Kamila Shamsie and Nadeem Aslam - to those going back - Mohsin Hamid and Mohammed Hanif - to those who are living there and writing in Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Baluchi and English, there is a startling opportunity to draw together an exciting collection of voices at the forefront of a literary renaissance. Granta 112: Pakistan will seize this moment, bringing to life the landscape and culture of the country in fiction, reportage, memoir, travelogue and poetry. Like the magazine's issues on India and Australia, its release will be a watershed moment critically and a chance to celebrate the corona of talent which has burst onto the English language publishing world in recent years.
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#121

Granta 121

The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists

2012

Since Granta’s inaugural list of the Best of Young British Novelists in 1983 � featuring Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes � the Best of Young issues have been some of the magazine’s most influential and best-selling. In 2010, Granta looked beyond the English-speaking world with Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists. Now, in an issue fully translated in partnership with Granta em Português, the magazine celebrates emerging talent from Brazil, many translated into English for the first time. Authors include Cristhiano Aguiar, Vanessa Barbara, Carol Bensimon, Javier Arancibia Contreras, J.P. Cuenca, Miguel del Castillo, Laura Erber, Emilio Fraia, Julian Fuks, Daniel Galera, Luisa Geisler, Vinicius Jatoba, Michel Laub, Tatiana Salem Levy, Ricardo Lisias, Chico Mattoso, Antonio Prata, Carola Saavendra, Leandro Sarmatz, and Antonio Xerxenesky. Plus: look for candid interviews, exclusive podcasts, and interactive features, which allow readers to comment on current and past issues, on our website, granta.com.
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#127

Granta 127

Japan

2014

Everyone knows this country and no one knows it. This issue presents twenty new Japans by its writers and artists, and by residents and visitors and neighbours. A special edition of Granta published simultaneously in Japanese and English.
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#157

Granta 157

Should We Have Stayed at Home?

2021

From Antarctica and the deserts of the US-Mexico border, to a Siberian whale-killing station and the alleyways of Taipei, these dispatches describe a world in perpetual motion (even when it is 'locked-down'). To travel, we are reminded, is to embrace the experience of being a stranger - to acknowledge that one person's frontier is another's home. In 1984 Granta published its first issue devoted to travel writing. Nearly forty years after that genre-defining volume, a new generation of writers from around the globe offers a new vision of what travel writing can be. Granta 157 is guest-edited by award-winning travel writer William Atkins . It Jason Allen-Paisant remembers the trees of his childhood Jamaica from his home in Leeds Carlos Manuel Alvarez navigates Cuba's customs system Eliane Brum travels from her home in the Brazilian Amazon to Antarctica in the era of climate crisis Francisco Cantu and Javier Zamora : a former border guard travels to the US-Mexico border with a former undocumented migrant who crossed the border as a child Jennifer Croft 's richly illustrated essay on postcards and graffiti, inspired by Los Angeles Bathsheba Demuth visits a whale-hunting station on the Bering Strait, Russia Sinead Gleeson visits Brazil with Clarice Lispector Kate Harris with the Tinglit people of the Taku River basin, Alaska Artist Roni Horn on Iceland Emmanuel Iduma returns to Lagos in his late father's footsteps, Nigeria Kapka Kassabova among the gatherers of the ancient Mesta River, Bulgaria Taran Khan with Afghan migrants in Germany and Kabul Jessica J. Lee in the alleyways of Taipei, Taiwan, in search of her mother's home Sven Lindqvist in the Mauritanian Sahara in 1987 - a previously unpublished essay by the late icon of travel writing Ben Mauk among the volcanoes of Duterte's Philippines Pascale Petit tracks tigers in Paris and India Photographer James Tylor on the legacy of whaling in Indigenous South Australia
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#158

Granta 158

In the Family

2022

Granta 158: In the Family features Fatima Bhutto on grief and loss; Chris Dennis on his teenage relationship with an older man; Charif Majdalani (trans. Ruth Diver) on the fragmenting situation in Beirut and Will Rees on a journey through the NHS in search of a diagnosis. This winter issue includes fiction by Nathan Harris, Julie Hecht, Sheila Heti, Moses McKenzie, Debbie Urbanski and Kate Zambreno, as well as poetry by Akwaeke Emezi, Claire Schwartz and Dawn Watson. A poem by Rachel Long introduces a photoessay by Lewis Khan, and Damian Le Bas introduces a photoessay made by the Herak family.
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#159

Granta 159 - What Do You See?

2022

This spring issue features award-winning writer William Atkins on the proposed nuclear power station Sizewell C, and introduces exciting new voices Lars Horn and Rebecca Sollom. In travel writing, Granta 159 has Jason Allen-Paisant on Haiti and Ishion Hutchinson on Senegal, as well as memoir by Kevin Childs, Geoff Dyer and Alejandro Zambra (tr. Megan McDowell). With fiction by Adam Foulds, Andrew Holleran and Maxim Osipov (tr. Alex Fleming), and photoessays by Phalonne Pierre Louis, Raphaela Rosella introduced by Nicole R. Fleetwood and Muhammad Salah introduced by Esther Kinsky.
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#160

Granta 160

Conflict

2022

From Nobel laureates to debut novelists, international translations to investigative journalism, each issue of Granta turns the attention of the world's best writers on to one aspect of the way we live now. Granta 160: Conflict features Lindsey Hilsum, Volodymyr Rafeyenko (tr. Sasha Dugdale ), Daniel Trilling and Sana Valiulina (tr. Polly Gannon ) on the war in Ukraine, but the theme of conflict is internal as well as external. This summer issue also includes memoir by Janet Malcolm, Sarah Moss, Suzanne Scanlon, and essays by Rebecca May Johnson and George Prochnik . new fiction by Aidan Cottrell-Boyce, Jane Delury and Dizz Tate and poetry by Rae Armantrout, Sandra Cisneros and Peter Gizzi . Photography by Aline Deschamps (introduced by Rattawut Lapcharoensap ) and Thomas Duffield .
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#163

Granta 163

Best of Young British Novelists 5

2023

Granta 163: Best of Young British Novelists 5 celebrates the twenty most significant writers under forty working in the UK in 2023. Previous issues in this series have earmarked rising stars like Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson. This cohort was selected by judges Tash Aw, Rachel Cusk, Brian Dillon, Helen Oyeyemi and Sigrid Rausing. The fifth generation is Graeme Armstrong, Jennifer Atkins, Sara Baume, Sarah Bernstein, Natasha Brown, Eleanor Catton, Eliza Clark, Tom Crewe, Lauren Aimee Curtis, Camilla Grudova, Isabella Hammad, Sophie Mackintosh, Anna Metcalfe, Thomas Morris, Derek Owusu, K Patrick, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Saba Sams, Olivia Sudjic and Eley Williams. With portraits by Alice Zoo and cover artwork by Donal Sturt.

Authors

Bill Buford
Bill Buford
Author · 34 books

Bill Buford is an American author and journalist. Buford is the author of the books: Among the Thugs and Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany.

Kate Harris
Kate Harris
Author · 2 books
I’m a writer with a knack for getting lost and a grudge against borders. Condé Nast Traveller named me one of the "world’s most adventurous women” for various ill-advised escapades on bikes and skis in countries with names often ending in “stan.” But my main adventure these days is staying put, in an off-grid log cabin in the Canadian subarctic, where I've been learning how to fly a small plane. My first book was Lands of Lost Borders. I’m hard at work on my second.
Simon Gray
Simon Gray
Author · 11 books

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. Simon James Holliday Gray, CBE (21 October 1936 – 7 August 2008) was an English playwright and memoirist who also had a career as a university lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary, University of London, for 20 years. While teaching at Queen Mary, Gray began his writing career as a novelist in 1963 and, during the next 45 years, in addition to 5 published novels, wrote 40 original stage plays, screenplays, and screen adaptations of his own and others' works for stage, film, and television and became well known for the self-deprecating wit characteristic of several volumes of memoirs or diaries

Frederic Tuten
Frederic Tuten
Author · 8 books
Frederic Tuten is the author of Tintin in the New World, The Green Hour, and Self Portraits, among other fiction. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Writing. He lives in New York City."
Ismail Kadare
Ismail Kadare
Author · 41 books

Ismail Kadare (also spelled Kadaré) is an Albanian novelist and poet. He has been a leading literary figure in Albania since the 1960s. He focused on short stories until the publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army. In 1996 he became a lifetime member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of France. In 1992, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca; in 2005, he won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize, in 2009 the Prince of Asturias Award of Arts, and in 2015 the Jerusalem Prize. He has divided his time between Albania and France since 1990. Kadare has been mentioned as a possible recipient for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. His works have been published in about 30 languages. Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 in Gjirokastër, in the south of Albania. His education included studies at the University of Tirana and then the Gorky Institute for World Literature in Moscow, a training school for writers and critics. In 1960 Kadare returned to Albania after the country broke ties with the Soviet Union, and he became a journalist and published his first poems. His first novel, The General of the Dead Army, sprang from a short story, and its success established his name in Albania and enabled Kadare to become a full-time writer. Kadare's novels draw on Balkan history and legends. They are obliquely ironic as a result of trying to withstand political scrutiny. Among his best known books are Chronicle in Stone (1977), Broken April (1978), and The Concert (1988), considered the best novel of the year 1991 by the French literary magazine Lire. In 1990, Kadare claimed political asylum in France, issuing statements in favour of democratisation. During the ordeal, he stated that "dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible. The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship."

Helon Habila
Helon Habila
Author · 7 books

Helon Habila was born in Nigeria in 1967. He studied literature at the University of Jos and taught at the Federal Polytechnic Bauchi, before moving to Lagos to work as a journalist. In Lagos he wrote his first novel, Waiting for an Angel, which won the Caine Prize in 2001. Waiting for an Angel has been translated into many languages including Dutch, Italian, Swedish, and French. In 2002, he moved to England to become the African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia. After his fellowship he enrolled for a PhD in Creative Writing. His writing has won many prizes including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, 2003. In 2005-2006 he was the first Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College in New York. He is a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review, and in 2006 he co-edited the British Council's anthology, NW14: The Anthology of New Writing, Volume 14. His second novel, Measuring Time, was published in February 2007. He currently teaches Creative Writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he lives with his wife and children.

Said Sayrafiezadeh
Said Sayrafiezadeh
Author · 4 books

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is a memoirist, fiction writer and playwright. He is the author of the forthcoming story collection American Estrangement. His memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by Dwight Garner of The New York Times, and his debut story collection, Brief Encounters With the Enemy, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fiction Prize. His short stories and personal essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, Granta, McSweeney’s, The New York Times, and New American Stories, among other publications. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction and a Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers’ fiction fellowship. Saïd lives in New York City with his wife, the artist Karen Mainenti, and serves on the board of directors for the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and teaches creative writing at Columbia University, Hunter College and NYU, where he received an Outstanding Teaching Award.

Sigrid Rausing
Author · 21 books
Sigrid Rausing is Editor and Publisher of Granta magazine and Publisher of Granta and Portobello Books. She is the author of History, Memory and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia: The End of a Collective Farm and Everything is Wonderful, which has been translated into four different languages.
Simon Garfield
Simon Garfield
Author · 22 books
Simon Garfield is a British journalist and non-fiction author. He was educated at the independent University College School in Hampstead, London, and the London School of Economics, where he was the Executive Editor of The Beaver. He also regularly writes for The Observer newspaper.
Geoff Dyer
Author · 22 books

Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. He was educated at the local Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, short-listed for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (winner of the 2004 W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award), and The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography), and Zona (about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker). His collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012. He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. A new book, Another Great Day at Sea, about life aboard the USS George H W Bush has just been published by Pantheon. In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2009 he was the recipient of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Best Comic Novel and the GQ Writer of the Year Award (for Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi). His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. His website is geoffdyer.com

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