Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 137
Autumn 2016
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.
Cover photography © Eamonn Doyle / Neutral Grey
From this Issue
Essays & Memoir|Granta 137
Essays & Memoir|Granta 137
Introduction
Sigrid Rausing
‘What future youth movement might capture them, those international participants in virtual hunts?’
Essays & Memoir|Granta 137
Essays & Memoir|Granta 137
Peace Shall Destroy Many
Miriam Toews
‘It creates deep-seated wells of rage that find no release.’
Miriam Toews on pacifism in Mennonite communities.
Essays & Memoir|Granta 137
Essays & Memoir|Granta 137
The Sufferings of this Present Time Are Not Worthy to Be Compared With the Glory Which Shall Be Revealed in Us
Matilda Gustavsson
A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not...
Essays & Memoir|Granta 137
Essays & Memoir|Granta 137
The Shepherds
Lauren Hough
‘Our pasts are so unbelievable we need a witness for our own memory.’
Poetry|Granta 137
Essays & Memoir|Granta 137
Essays & Memoir|Granta 137
Bad Faith
Ken Follett
‘Every sect needs jargon. We did not have churches, we had halls; services were called meetings; the congregation was the assembly; elders were overseers’
Art & Photography|Granta 137
Art & Photography|Granta 137
Blue Sky Days
Tomas van Houtryve & Eliza Griswold
‘For those caught beneath its thrum, there’s no comfort that the drone, and whoever is at its helm in America, is only targeting the bad guys.’ Eliza Griswold introduces Tomas van Houtryve's unsettling photo-essay taken by drones coming close to civilian life in the manner of the drones currently deployed in Afghanistan.
Essays & Memoir|Granta 137
Essays & Memoir|Granta 137
The Interpreters: Among the Brahmins of Benares
Aatish Taseer
‘That first sight of the city curled around the river goes through me like the breath of something old and known and familiar.’ Aatish Taseer revisits Varanasi.
Essays & Memoir|Granta 137
Essays & Memoir|Granta 137
Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard
Ivan Chistyakov
‘Freedom, even with hunger and cold, is still precious and irreplaceable.’
Poetry|Granta 137
Poetry|Granta 137
Your Youth
Kelly Schirmann
‘I have never been in love / with so many variants of nothing.’
Fiction|Granta 137
Fiction|Granta 137
The Transition
Luke Kennard
In the not-so-distant future, middle-class underachievers are faced with a difficult choice: prison or motivational business classes.
Poetry|Granta 137
Poetry|Granta 137
Cassette-tape
Javier Zamora
‘I will etch visas on toilet paper and throw them from a lighthouse.’
Art & Photography|Granta 137
Art & Photography|Granta 137
To Live and Die in South Korea
Françoise Huguier & A.M. Homes
‘Blow the candle out, taste the darkness and come back changed.’
Fiction|Granta 137
Fiction|Granta 137
Poetry|Granta 137
Poetry|Granta 137
Enjaracon Sponaeda
Will Alexander
‘how can all the pressures of surveillance / fail to describe me?’
Essays & Memoir|Granta 137
Essays & Memoir|Granta 137
Going Diamond
Sarah Gerard
‘In Amway, there’s no such thing as contentment.’
Art & Photography|Granta 137
Art & Photography|Granta 137
Julie’s Life
Emmanuel Carrère & Darcy Padilla
‘Even today, she still speaks with emotion about Dorian, the transsexual so proud of her breasts, Diane, who weighed only sixty-five pounds, and Steven, who was so frightened of dying alone that Darcy wished she could promise to be with him when the time came.’ Emmanuel Carrère on addiction and poverty in an forgotten America.
The Online Edition
Poetry|The Online Edition
Two Poems
Pascale Petit
‘His sheets smell of formalin. / She feels as if her insides // are outside her, in a freezer.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
Naugahyde
Gordon Lish
A story of ageing infidelity: ‘He would seek to remember and she would seek to remember – each succeeding a little differently from the other.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
Portrayal: A Double Portrait
Edward Doegar
‘You can’t control your face / The Empire has over-reached / Expressions // Have become flags’
Five Things Right Now|The Online Edition
Gwendoline Riley | Five Things Right Now
Gwendoline Riley
Gwendoline Riley on Caspar David Friedrich, sketching and Chekhov.
Art & Photography|The Online Edition
Dance of Order
Noh Suntag
‘I am exploring how the Korean War lives and breathes in contemporary Korean society.’ Photographs from Korea by Noh Suntag.
Fiction|The Online Edition
A Scale Model of Gull Point
Kate Folk
Trapped in a revolving restaurant during an American revolution, Shel VanRybroek turns to tin-foil sculpture.
Fiction|The Online Edition
The Boat
John Connell
John Connell writes of a trial and a murder during the Irish War of Independence.
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Victim Politics
Ben Rawlence
‘The push and pull of identity politics is the child of slavery and empire.’ Ben Rawlence on empire and the construction of white identity.
Fiction|The Online Edition
Armadillo Man
Julianne Pachico
‘The Armadillo Man is watching her. She gives him a good show – the best she has to offer.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The False Lords of Misrule
Peter Pomerantsev
Peter Pomerantsev takes us on a tour of the lewd, crude language of modern politics – from Trump to Putin to Duterte, Milo Yianopoulos, Boris Johnson and more.
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
A Land Without Strangers
Ben Mauk
Ben Mauk on nationalism and xenophobia in Poland.
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Ken Follett Reads ‘Bad Faith’
Ken Follett
Ken Follett reads his piece, ‘Bad Faith’, from Granta 137
Poetry|The Online Edition
Three Poems
James Byrne
‘Another kind of people hobgoblins / the minds of little men.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The Comrades and I
Mona Abouissa
Mona Abouissa on her experiences with Egyptian communists, and the role they played in Egypt before 1952, when they were excised from official history.
Fiction|The Online Edition
4 3 2 1: Overture
Paul Auster
‘According to family legend, Ferguson’s grandfather departed on foot from his native city of Minsk with one hundred rubles sewn into the lining of his jacket’
An extract from 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster.
Fiction|The Online Edition
The Island
Jack Underwood
‘She draws from her mind the image of a giant steel girder, pictures it smashing through the wall of the bar, obliterating everything, legs and arms reaching and waving.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
Night of the Gnomes
J.R. Wilcock
‘The plan was quite simple: Güendolina would invite him into the bedroom and persuade him to make love to her until he was utterly exhausted.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Spiders from Jerusalem
Wioletta Greg
‘When the Holy Family was fleeing from Jerusalem, spiders wove such a thick web around the road that the swords of Herod’s soldiers couldn’t pierce it.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Words and the Word
Miranda France
Miranda France on how C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot redrafted the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.
Fiction|The Online Edition
The Cleanse
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
‘There is foam on the sea of our blood. It is the foam of history. We are the survivors, we say.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The Cult of the Hindu Cowboy
Snigdha Poonam
‘The Hindu cowboy accords to the cow the holiest status in his imagination: of mother. It is his duty to protect her honour; it is his privilege to kill for her.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
First Sentence: Javier Zamora
Javier Zamora
‘Immigration has become a physical thing, like a tumor inside us, between us.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
When Denmark Criminalised Kindness
Lisbeth Zornig Andersen
‘We now know that it is a criminal offence to help refugees in distress.’
Five Things Right Now|The Online Edition
Five Things Right Now: Cynan Jones
Cynan Jones
‘A pair of seagulls. I say a pair. They might just be good friends.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
Traffic
Rae Armantrout
‘Music needs silence / more than silence needs music.’ New poetry by Rae Armantrout.
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The Fairytale
Jennifer Kabat
‘In Hollin Hills, we believed our flatware could change the world.’ Jennifer Kabat on the intersection of modernist architecture and espionage.
Five Things Right Now|The Online Edition
Five Things Right Now: April Ayers Lawson
April Ayers Lawson
She shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.