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← Back to all issuesGranta 118: Exit Strategies
Winter 2012
In this issue John Barth contemplates the end of writing fiction. Alice Munro explores the interior world of an elderly woman losing her memory. Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of his family’s escape from the Bosnian War, and the love and fate of Mek, their Irish setter. David Long writes about a man haunted by a sexual encounter decades ago. Claire Messud searches for her father’s Beirut, long since gone, as he himself lies dying in a hospice in Connecticut.
From this Issue
Essays & Memoir|Granta 118
Essays & Memoir|Granta 118
Leaving Afghanistan
Christopher Merrill
‘An Afghan saying – if you turn over a rock, you will find a poet.'
Essays & Memoir|Granta 118
Essays & Memoir|Granta 118
The Road to Damascus
Claire Messud
‘How can it be, that all that is in us dies with us?’
Fiction|Granta 118
Fiction|Granta 118
City Boy
Judy Chicurel
‘I would have dreams that woke me in the middle of the night, my heart shaking inside my body.’
Essays & Memoir|Granta 118
Essays & Memoir|Granta 118
Summer
Jacob Newberry
‘I met Jay two summers after Katrina, two years after my parents separated, two years after I came out.’
Fiction|Granta 118
Fiction|Granta 118
The Interrogation
Vanessa Manko
‘I am not an anarchist neither am I a communist.’
Poetry|Granta 118
Poetry|Granta 118
Station
Ishion Hutchinson
‘The train station was a cemetery. / Drunk with spirits, another being entered.’
Fiction|Granta 118
Fiction|Granta 118
America
Chinelo Okparanta
‘It is a reluctant kind of disregard that stems from a feeling of shame.’
Art & Photography|Granta 118
Art & Photography|Granta 118
The Island
Stacy Kranitz
‘Family bloodlines run deep and often intertwine.’
Fiction|Granta 118
Fiction|Granta 118
The Provincials
Daniel Alarcón
‘I'd been out of the Conservatory for about a year when my great-uncle Raúl died.’
Fiction|Granta 118
Fiction|Granta 118
The Beginner’s Goodbye
Anne Tyler
‘Sometimes the most recent moments can seem so long, long ago.’
Poetry|Granta 118
Poetry|Granta 118
At Thirty
Paula Bohince
‘At thirty, I fled from my life / in a hailstorm and firestorm’
Poetry|Granta 118
Poetry|Granta 118
Pay Attention
Sophie Cabot Black
‘I can only do what is here. But you / Have an entire congregation of choice’
Fiction|Granta 118
Fiction|Granta 118
Bonfire
David Long
In his New England town, when Hawkins was a boy, Independence Day was celebrated...
Fiction|Granta 118
Fiction|Granta 118
In Sight of the Lake
Alice Munro
‘She liked how the latticework would provide a touch of fantasy.’
Fiction by Alice Munro.
Essays & Memoir|Granta 118
Essays & Memoir|Granta 118
The End?
John Barth
‘What do you do when your daily routine comes to a halt, when your latest achievement just might be your last?’
Essays & Memoir|Granta 118
Essays & Memoir|Granta 118
War Dogs
Aleksandar Hemon
‘He never bothered the refugees, never barked at those miserable people.’
In Conversation|Granta 118
In Conversation|Granta 118
Letters from One Young Poet to Another
Caleb Klaces & Soledad Marambio
‘I do like to think of my poems as messages.’
The Online Edition
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Howard Goldblatt | Interview
Howard Goldblatt & Sophia Efthimiatou
‘Humour, jokes, puns – those are indeed untranslatable.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
On Waking from a Dream
Stephen Grosz
‘As a psychoanalyst, I feel uncomfortable when I can’t remember a dream.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Books I Read This Year
Various Contributors
A selection of Granta contributors discuss the books they read in 2012.
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Han Dong | Interview
Han Dong & Philip Hand
‘Inflaming readers isn’t a good thing; I want to entice them.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
Two Poems
Paula Bohince
‘What sparrows come, / come briefly, briefly displacing / the nothingness.’
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Paula Bohince | Interview
Paula Bohince & Ted Hodgkinson
‘I like the friction of fixed physical atmospheres with different lives passing through.’
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Rowan Ricardo Phillips | Interview
Rowan Ricardo Phillips & Ted Hodgkinson
‘Poetry’s strongest response, on the other hand, is determined, open-ended world-making, which is the work of empathy.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Refugee Dreams
Peter Behrens
‘In his mind he is back in Frankfurt once more, trying to catch that last train across the frontier.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
God Bless You, 2011
Hiromi Kawakami
‘If the god of uranium really exists, then what must he be thinking? Were this a fairy tale of old, what would happen when humans broke the laws of nature to turn gods into minions?’ Hiromi Kawakami on the nature gods of Japan.
Fiction|The Online Edition
Tea Water
Gyrdir Eliasson
‘We sat on the little stools under the window and watched Grandma in her dress with the red roses on it, against the backdrop of the blue-painted kitchen.’
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Edmund White | Interview
Edmund White & Patrick Ryan
‘Although I was trying for the big-city and suburban realism of Yates, I didn’t mind adding a bit of fairy dust in the dialogue.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
Runs Girl | New Voices
Chinelo Okparanta
‘The year Mama fell sick was the year Njideka confessed to me that she was a runs girl.’
In Conversation|The Online Edition
John Barth | Podcast
John Barth
John Barth discusses discovering William Faulkner and Lawrence Sterne as a student, the parallels between writing and arranging music, what happened to postmodernism and waiting for the muse to call.
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The End?: Writers respond to John Barth
Various Contributors
'I suggest he put aside all his writing rituals and that he give away all his money – that way he might find his talent will be rebooted.'
Poetry|The Online Edition
Promenading
Chris Emery
A poem by Chris Emery, taken from his forthcoming collection The Departure.
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Brodsky’s Room and a Half
Valeria Luiselli
‘It’s enough to sit in silence for the duration of a lighted cigarette in order to be taken over by the life force flourishing among the graves.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
A Trip to Syria
David McConnell
‘Several years ago, a friend and I stayed at the one hotel set amid the ruins of Queen Zenobia’s oasis capital, Palmyra, in the Syrian desert.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
Sky Burial
Maile Chapman
‘That was my first introduction to the way that the elderly are obliged to live: the dependence, the danger and the enormous expense when something does happen.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
Unleaving
Justin Mundhenk
‘She felt like she was stepping on someone’s knuckles. With each careful step, she heard the sound of breaking bones.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
That Father Lost
Dave Lucas
‘The last words I heard my father speak were Help me, over and over again. In all the rest of my life I will never reconcile this with any God I could dream of believing in.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
Abingdon Square Park
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
‘I once had had a thought / About a thought I once had had.’
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Chinelo Okparanta | Interview
Chinelo Okparanta & Yuka Igarashi
‘I wanted to be sure to approach their resistance to Nnenna’s homosexuality from a practical perspective – one of fear, rather than one of hate.’
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Letters From Two Exit Strategists
Jacob Newberry & Vanessa Manko
‘I feel like I’ll spend a great many years unravelling whatever is being stored inside of me just now.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
Supernovae
Ellen Rachlin
‘Theory cannot be tangible fact / like driving on I-95 to get to a lecture / on supernovae.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The Madonna of the Sea
Maaza Mengiste
‘If you can survive, all of this will pass.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Detroit, 1966
Lynda Schuster
‘This is how it starts, my yearning to escape: with a snot-green triangular stamp from Qatar.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
The Moon and Back
Jessica Thummel
‘John Wayne Durler had always needed something to run from.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
sleeping far from home
Soledad Marambio
‘They told her a thrush came into the house / and fell asleep by the TV.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
The Sun in a Box
Caleb Klaces
‘When I was younger I drafted a memory. / I drew a rectangle on a piece of card / and called it a computer.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Holy Solitude
Kong Yalei
‘I always think, either as a reader or as a writer, one person – anyone – can struggle against this filthy world by entering into a world of literature.’
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Jon McGregor | Podcast
Jon McGregor & Ted Hodgkinson
Jon McGregor on reworking his first published story from the female perspective, his enduring fascination with Lincolnshire and his new short story collection, This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You.
Poetry|The Online Edition
We’ll always have Paris
Richard Meier
‘I’d gone there with my girlfriend of three years, / then left her three days after meeting you.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
Drifting House
Krys Lee
‘Houses loomed like ghosts. The government’s face was everywhere: on the sides of a beached cart, above the lintel of the post office.’
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Juan Pablo Villalobos | Interview
Juan Pablo Villalobos & Rosalind Harvey
‘I’m not interested in ‘transparent’ or ‘objective’ narrators, I’m just looking for gripping fictional voices.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
The Moon and the Batteries
Hiromi Kawakami
‘His full name was Mr Harutsuna Matsumoto, but I called him ‘Sensei’. Not ‘Mr’ or ‘Sir’, just ‘Sensei’.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
Bird of Fire
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
‘No more, no longer the sweet difference / Between real and dream I knew.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
The Grandson of Jesus Christ
Apricot Irving
‘His heart is a tired engine with too many loose screws and faulty wires, not weightless like the tissue-thin kites he used to fly with his grandfather as the string danced between his fingers.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
Santa Claus is in the Living Room
Santiago Roncagliolo
‘I soon understood that if I wanted to get my father back I was going to have to help him get rid of the competition.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man | New Voices
Nick Dybek
‘We searched the horizon for returning fishermen, who arrived shaggy and greasy, telling their stories but not their secrets.’
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Nick Dybek | Interview
Nick Dybek & Ted Hodgkinson
‘Maybe it’s what draws so many writers to the adolescent perspective; during that time, imagination and experience are in a death match.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
Sunday Drive Home
David Masello
‘On the drive down the Taconic, / you sleep, your head sinks then snaps / up when it reaches some reflex angle.’
In Conversation|The Online Edition
Owen Freeman | Interview
Owen Freeman & Daniela Silva
‘As illustrators, our first and last service is to bring the readers’ eyes to the author’s work.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Revolution Revived: Egyptian Diary
Wiam El-Tamami
‘This is what they don’t tell you on the news – about the pockets of normalcy that always exist, persist.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Our Adder
Richard Kerridge
‘Our zoo needed something more thrilling, more dangerous, we had decided. We wanted an adder.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Prison Echoes
Shahrnush Parsipur
‘When you are free, you inevitably feel compelled to act, but when incarcerated, you are powerless to do so.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
Dark Night
Ben Okri
‘On a night when my soul was damp / I found in the street a dark lamp. / The moon was cold and green, / The sky had a sinister sheen’
Fiction|The Online Edition
At The Kitchen Table
Peter Orner
‘Your husband dies, you’re a widow. There’s almost joy in it. Why not scream it? Glory.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
The Plano Suicides
Stefan Merrill Block
‘My parents moved us to Plano for the reasons so many move to Plano: jobs, good schools, a town perfectly engineered to render successful families.’
Fiction|The Online Edition
Preserves for Life
Olga Tokarczuk
‘He came upon one under the kitchen sink labelled ‘Shoestrings in vinegar, 2004’, and that should have alarmed him.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Madison, Mon Amour
Patrick Ryan
‘I left the office just in time to get to Penn Station, find my track and hop onto my train. We pulled out into an afternoon grey and heavy with rain.’