Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 105: Lost and Found
Spring 2009
In this issue, we reflect on people and places undergoing momentous change. Jeremy Treglown investigates the Spanish Civil War’s restless dead; Elizabeth Pisani searches for truth in Tiananmen Square, twenty years on; Maurice Walsh talks to Ireland’s priests about how their role in the community is changing beyond recognition; and Rick Gekoski is consumed by the lost lines of a genius. Plus, fiction by A.L. Kennedy, Janet Frame and Altán Walker; poetry by John Burnside; and Jan Morris goes sailing in Cardigan Bay.
From this Issue
Essays & Memoir|Granta 105
Essays & Memoir|Granta 105
Subject+Object
Jan Morris
‘The sea runs through our house – not literally, of course, but metaphorically, or perhaps emotionally.’
Fiction|Granta 105
Essays & Memoir|Granta 105
Essays & Memoir|Granta 105
Among the Pipemen
Andrew Martin
‘It was as though, after a period of wariness, my pipe had warmed to me.’
Art & Photography|Granta 105
Art & Photography|Granta 105
Censored
Bruce Connew
‘It was an isolated incident, and there had been no official or unofficial communication about it.’
Fiction|Granta 105
Fiction|Granta 105
The Silkworms
Janet Frame
‘Nothing has changed, Edgar said. What new event is written into their history? None. Where is their future? Nowhere. Are they against or for progress? It was dark when Edgar took the box outside down to the rubbish heap and sprinkled the dead moths upon the ashes of the diseased pawpaw.’ Janet Frame on an unsettling natural process.
Essays & Memoir|Granta 105
Essays & Memoir|Granta 105
A Ghost Story
Rick Gekoski
‘It drives me crazy when I can’t make it stop.’
The Online Edition
Fiction|The Online Edition
Beachcombing
Lucy Wood
‘He was stamped darkly onto the wide stretch of sea like a single footprint.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
A Summer’s Evening in Beijing
Elizabeth Pisani
‘The air is light with the intoxicating fumes of impending martyrdom.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
A Vacation From Myself
John Beckman
‘My every next thought took a melancholy detour through drippy forests of humid emotions, often never to return’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
J.G. Ballard
Various Contributors
‘The warmest companion with the coldest vision of where Humanity might head.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The Last Modernist
Chris Petit
‘If there were any sense of cultural justice in this country, the Westway – that chunk of concrete modernism – would be renamed after J.G. Ballard.’
In Translation|The Online Edition
Teenager
Wislawa Szymborska
‘I know much more — / but nothing for sure.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Lost and Found
Je Banach
‘And yet, despite the overwhelming evidence of Lamb’s influence on contemporary writing, the nineteenth-century superstar has been largely ignored and mostly forgotten.’
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Ablutions
Patrick deWitt
An animated video including a reading from Patrick deWitt’s novel Ablutions.
Poetry|The Online Edition
Two Poems
Jack Gilbert
‘Loneliness is the mother’s milk of America. / The heart is a foreign country whose language none / of us is good at. ’
Art & Photography|The Online Edition
Onboard the US Coast Guard Cutter Dallas
Michael Peel
Photographs from onboard the US Coast Guard Cutter Dallas.
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Paradox of Plenty
Michael Peel
‘The blend of volatile domestic politics and geostrategic oil interests is at best opaque and at worst thoroughly corrosive of all involved.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The Inauguration
Daniel Alarcón
‘With few exceptions, presidents do not comment on or even recognize an individual loss like this one; they operate on another scale, and there is no room within their discourse for something so small.’