Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 21: The Story-Teller
Spring 1987
Bruce Chatwin in the outback, Ryszard Kapuscinski carrying a coffin through the Polish ‘bush’, and John Berger defining the story-teller: detached, skeptical, and intensely compassionate. With stories from Richard Ford, Isabel Allende, Raymond Carver, and Oliver Sacks, and Primo Levi on weightlessness – one of the last pieces he wrote before his suicide.
From this Issue
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A Story for Aesop
John Berger
‘The image impressed me when I set eyes upon it for the first time. It was as if it were already familiar, as if, as a child, I had already seen the same man framed in a doorway.’
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Dreamtime
Bruce Chatwin
‘In Alice Springs – a grid of scorching streets where men in long white socks were forever getting in and out of Land Cruisers – I met a Russian who was mapping the sacred sites of the Aboriginals.’
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Ryszard Kapuściński | Interview
Ryszard Kapuściński & Bill Buford
‘Mine is not a vocation, it's a mission.’
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Outline For A Book
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘I have come home from Africa, jumping from a tropical roasting-pit and dropping into a snow-bank.’
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Stiff
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘On the flatbed lies a coffin. Atop the black box is a garland of haggard angels.’
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A Battle
Patrick Süskind
‘Early one August evening, when most people had already left the park, two men sat confronting one another across a chessboard.’
|Granta 21
The Judge’s Wife
Isabel Allende
‘Nicolas Vidal always knew he would lose his head over a woman.’
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Cold Storage
Oliver Sacks
‘Uncle Toby was alive, but suspended, apparently, in some strange icy stupor.’
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Paradise
Jonathan Schell
‘It is characteristic of Brodsky that he attributes the substance of his thinking to another writer's lines.’
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Letters from Prison
Václav Havel & Jiří Dienstbier
‘When the governor forbade Havel to write essays, ordering him to write only about himself, he started a series on his fifteen different moods.’
|Granta 21
Menudo
Raymond Carver
‘Vicky says I’m crazy. She said worse things too last night. But who could blame her?’
