Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 83: This Overheating World
Autumn 2003
This issue of Granta explores what is happening to our planet and what we can do to reverse the damage. Featuring new work from Thomas Keneally, Philip Marsden and Maarten’t Hart.
From this Issue
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The Weather in Mongolia
Philip Marsden
‘In Mongolian lore, winter lasts precisely eighty-one days: nine periods of nine days’.
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Rowing to Alaska
Wayne McLennan
‘I can't remember whose idea it was, whose heart first beat faster, who made the other excited, but at some point Doug and I decided to row a boat to Alaska.’
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The Greenland Pump
Matthew Hart
‘In its currents the ocean is printing news about our future, and we must keep up on the latest bulletins.’
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Captain Scott’s Biscuit
Thomas Keneally
‘So the Ross Sea Novotel and McMurdo Sheraton could be built within this century. Children will gambol on the ice shelf where Scott exhaled his last, pained breath.’
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Bone Litter
Marian Botsford Fraser
‘There is a tiny skull on a pillow of bright green moss, and arm and leg bones neatly crossed, as if they had just been gently placed there in mourning.’
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Do Fish Feel Pain?
James Hamilton-Paterson
‘There will always be an unbridgeable conceptual gap between our unique species and the rest.’
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Hot News
Mark Lynas
‘Very little of Tuvalu is much more than twenty inches above the Pacific and its coral bedrock is so porous that no amount of coastal protection can save it.’ Brief bulletins from the frontiers of climate change: Alaska, Australia, China, Tuvalu, the United States and Peru.
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The First Punch
Jon McGregor
‘I’m on the ground, and he is standing over me. Everything is muffled. I’m aware of the sound of running water somewhere.’
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Loot
Christopher de Bellaigue
‘As I observed the foreigners at the museum, who turned out mostly to be archaeologists, two American soldiers crossed towards the group.’
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With the Invaders
James Meek
‘I wonder what George Bush had for dinner last night. His fork must have been clinking on the china just about the time when his marines were killing Omar's family.’
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Twenty-Eight Days in Baghdad
Nuha al-Radi
‘Rumsfeld says everything is improving day by day. I suggest he come live here for a couple of days and then say that.’
