Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 126: do you remember
Winter 2014
We are what we remember, and even when we invent, we write what we remember. Every line is a fragment of something else; that is the great collective project that we call culture. In this issue of Granta, writers remember, or invent, scenes from their own lives and the lives of others.
From this Issue
|Granta 126
Paradise Lost
Yuri Kozyrev & Nathan Thornburgh
‘‘Abkhaz democracy reminds me a lot of America,’ an Abkhaz journalist tells me over coffee. ‘It’s a democracy of heavily armed people.’’
|Granta 126
The Indian Uprising
Ann Beattie
‘Then winter ended and spring came, and I thought, even if I don’t believe there’s a poem in anything any more, maybe I’ll write a story.’
|Granta 126
The Defeated
Jonny Steinberg
‘Peter Mitchell died on a frontier, not so much between black and white, or between the landed and the landless, as between the past and the future.’
|Granta 126
Thank You for Having Me
Lorrie Moore
‘Every day there was something new to mourn and something old to celebrate.’
|Granta 126
The Common Cold
Laura Kasischke
‘But here we are again, you and I, the / two of us, tangled / up and biological.’
|Granta 126
Nudity
Norman Rush
‘I nursed a precocious rage at the stratagems society was employing to keep me from seeing naked women.’
|Granta 126
Dangerous
Joy Williams
‘Grief knows how to love them because we don’t know how to do it any more.’
|Granta 126
Toboggan Run
Fiona Benson
‘What would I give / to be one of those swimmers in all this snow, / swallowed by the cold and the night’s strange radiance?’
|Granta 126
My Avant-Garde Education
Bernard Cooper
‘My response to art was quick, metabolic and revelatory, while my response to sex was a muddle of delayed reactions and missed libidinal signals.’
|Granta 126
The Damned and the Beautiful: Patagonia Without Dams
Brigitte Grignet
‘There is no land like ours.’
|Granta 126
Off the Road
Andrew Brown
‘She acted as if her own desires magnetized the world, and when you were close to her, she magnetized your moral compass too.’
|Granta 126
Spelling Problem
Lydia Davis
‘A woman from Barnard College calls me and asks if I would please spell ‘hemorrhaging’ for her.’
|Granta 126
A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me
David Gates
‘It took longer and longer for the next one to come, and then there wasn’t a next one.’
