Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 1: New American Writing
Autumn 1979
The first issue of the new Granta collects work by some of the most accomplished American writers of the seventies – many published for the first time in Britain. Contributors include William Gass, Joyce Carol Oates, Donald Barthelme and Susan Sontag.
From this Issue
|Granta 1
Interview with Theodore Solotaroff
Theodore Solotaroff & William Warner
‘People belong to literary movements which are abstractions rather than to ways of life which are concrete.’
|Granta 1
The Universal Fears
John Hawkes
‘He was most seriously injured, as it turned out, not in the groin or flanks or belly, but in the head.’
|Granta 1
from Son of the Morning
Joyce Carol Oates
‘The livingness of the rifle and the bullet and the death spasm and his own bright quickening blood: never would he forget.’
|Granta 1
Present Imperfect: a Note on the Work of Walter Abish
Tony Tanner
‘To be born is to be born into a circuit of permissions and prohibitions, which constitutes the discourse (in the widest sense) of that particular culture’.
|Granta 1
Chuckle or Gasp: a Note on the Work of Leonard Michaels
Marc Granetz
‘The best writers are known by their voices’.
|Granta 1
Orgy, hors-je, hors-jeu: a Note on the Work of James Purdy
Norman Bryson
‘Reviews can be a little like antibodies.’
|Granta 1
The Men’s Club
Leonard Michaels
‘The night of the meeting I told my wife I’d be home before midnight.’
|Granta 1
Summer Tidings
James Purdy
‘He washed the quivering flesh of the wound in thick yellow soap.’
|Granta 1
Requa-I
Tillie Olsen
‘Night scratched at the window and seeped from the room corners. No other sound but rising river wind.’
|Granta 1
The New Music
Donald Barthelme
‘Went to the grocery store and Xeroxed a box of English muffins, two pounds of ground veal and an apple. In flagrant violation of the Copyright Act.’
|Granta 1
The Wor(l)ds of William Gass
D.D. Guttenplan
‘Ah, what bliss to be a word. Cool and shimmering in blue or black on a white page as pristine and inviting as any world before the first day of creation.’
|Granta 1
John Cheever in the Bourgeois Tradition
Jonathan Levi
‘For John Cheever, all gall is divided into three parts.’
Jonathan Levi on The Stories of John Cheever.
|Granta 1
Updike’s Nabokov
John Dugdale
‘The influence of Nabokov can be recognized throughout American fiction of the last two decades . . . but The Coup is the first time to my knowledge that this dominance has been thematized.’
|Granta 1
from The Franchiser
Stanley Elkin
‘In sickness he understood what he never had in health, that his body, anyone’s, everyone’s, was something for the public record.’
|Granta 1
from Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues
Ronald Sukenick
‘when rising expectations hit the upcoming decline hell was going to break loose it was already starting to break loose’
|Granta 1
A Plug for Bukowski
Henry Davis
‘There is an American literature that is anti-intellectual, apolitical and anti-social.’
