Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 17: While Waiting for a War
Autumn 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.
From this Issue
|Granta 17
‘They’: Stalin’s Polish Élite
Teresa Toranska
‘You referred to a comrade as ‘Mister’. That's offensive.’
|Granta 17
In Search of Amin
Patrick Marnham
‘In Chicago and London the men who had never been to Amin’s Uganda already knew what they thought. An eye-witness account only served to confuse them.’
|Granta 17
Forced Busing in South Africa
Joseph Lelyveld
‘In the other scene of black men in the dock, there had been fifty-six of them, wearing large numbered placards around their necks so they could be identified.’
|Granta 17
So Far
Nadine Gordimer & David Goldblatt
‘His photographs are a beginning, not a fixed moment.’
|Granta 17
Erotic Politicians and Mullahs
Hanif Kureishi
‘Strangely, anti-British remarks made me feel patriotic, though I only felt patriotic when I was away from England.’
|Granta 17
A Letter to my Sons: War’s End
Heinrich Böll
‘No, it's not easier for you than it was for us: don't let them tell you otherwise.’
|Granta 17
October, 1948
Kazuo Ishiguro
‘I remember looking around me with approval that first night, and today, for all the changes which have transformed the world around it, Mrs Kawakamu's remains as pleasing as ever.’
|Granta 17
A Queer Streak Part One: Anonymous Letters
Alice Munro
‘She would never know why she had done it. She was sleepless and strung-up and her better judgement had deserted her.’
|Granta 17
Herself in Love
Marianne Wiggins
‘She thought, Love is a Revelation, like a religion, some religions; like Islam.’
|Granta 17
My Mother’s Life (Part Two)
Doris Lessing
‘‘No, you can not,’ said my mother, ‘we can't afford it.’ Prophets are never appreciated by their nearest and dearest.’
|Granta 17
Italo Calvino
John Updike
‘Post-modernism, if it can be said to exist at all, had in Calvino its most seductive showman.’
