Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 104: Fathers
Winter 2008
Granta 104, new editor Alex Clark’s first issue, goes in search of fathers. We find David Goldblatt facing up to his late father’s unfinished paperwork, Siri Hustvedt probing the complexities of family ties and an arresting portrait of his father’s determination to buck convention by Ruchir Joshi. Francesca Segal revisits the Brooklyn of her father’s youth and finds it radically altered, Benjamin Markovits speculates on the strange relationship between the American coach and his protégés and there’s new fiction from James Lasdun, Emma Donoghue, Daniyal Mueenuddin and Kirsty Gunn.
From this Issue
|Granta 104
Editor’s Letter: The men who made us
Alex Clark
‘Time comes round and takes your stories.’
|Granta 104
Subject+Object: The fount of all smoky wisdom
Will Self
‘To explain what I now feel for the pipe I must paraphrase the writer Robert Stone’s remarks on hard drugs: I admire it from afar.’
|Granta 104
Olga Grushin | Portrait of My Father
Olga Grushin
‘Things that aren’t done right away are never done.’
|Granta 104
Doing the Paperwork: Life in the aftermath of a violent death
David Goldblatt
‘If the pressure of their life didn’t kill her it made the fight too hard.’
|Granta 104
Caterpillars
James Lasdun
‘But he had engulfed her somehow; taken up residence in her imagination like some large, dense, intractable problem that had been given to her to solve.’
|Granta 104
Provide, Provide
Daniyal Mueenuddin
‘You buy me things and then later you’ll think you bought me. I was never for sale.’
|Granta 104
Portrait of My Father
Adam Mars-Jones
‘I put my trophy on a high shelf, and at some stage laid it face down.’
|Granta 104
In My Father’s Footsteps
Francesca Segal
‘The two monoliths that dominated my father’s identity – the peak and the trough of his life – were Love Story and Parkinson’s disease.’
|Granta 104
Portrait of My Father
Jon McGregor
‘He must have taken thousands of services in that time, but this still feels like the holiest thing he’s ever done.‘
|Granta 104
Portrait of My Father
Jonathan Lethem
‘I wasn’t interested in childhood, I wanted to hang out with these guys.’
