Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 129: Fate
Autumn 2014
What is fate, in a culture of free will and self-determination? Where do we project our doom, that ancient and evolving belief in predestination? In this issue of Granta, twenty-two writers meditate on fate in all its many forms.
From this Issue
|Granta 129
Origin Myth
Mary Ruefle
‘Life continually circled in cold inaccessible serenity around unhappy Earth’
|Granta 129
Key Stroke
Will Self
Striking the keys of the same typewriter that once sat under J.G. Ballard’s fingers, Will Self reimagines the legendary writer’s last days.
|Granta 129
Self-Made Man
Mark Gevisser
Mark Gevisser examines the personal, political and social issues of transgender identity in America.
|Granta 129
Apparition
Mark Doty
‘an orange plastic basket of compost / down from the top of the garden – sweet dark, / fibrous rot, promising’
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Some Heat
Miranda July
‘No one knows why ripping up a name makes a person call – science can’t explain it. Erasing the name also works.’
|Granta 129
Miracles
Francisco Goldman
The violence the retablos depict, the calamities of fate, weather, accidents or of illness, move us because they distil so powerfully what we already know all too well.
|Granta 129
The Ferryman Is Dead
Saša Stanišić
Here, more die than are born. There’s a refrigerator at the bottom of the lake. The ferryman is dead. No one is coming to take his place.
|Granta 129
A Hebrew Sibyl
Cynthia Ozick
‘And so began what I was to become. To all these things – the admonitions and the testimonies, the rites and the annunciations – I had easily acquiesced.’
|Granta 129
Blasphemy
Fatima Bhutto
The tourists are gone. They’ve fled to Islamabad, along with the landlords and the hoteliers and the battalions of police that used to defend them, and certainty has left with them.
|Granta 129
The Atlantic Wall
Ianthe Ruthven
This chain of Nazi fortifications stretching from the Norwegian Arctic to France’s western frontier with Spain is one of Europe’s least acknowledged monuments.
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Where the World War Began
Joseph Roth
The World War began in Sarajevo, on a balmy summer afternoon in 1914. It...
|Granta 129
The Alphabet of Birds
S.J. Naudé
‘She is standing there, her body like a lamp, waiting for the glass to break.’
|Granta 129
Salad Days
Barbara Ras
‘nothing in those early evenings free / of care could have prepared you’
|Granta 129
In the Shadow of the Hospital
Tim Winton
‘All that yearning spilling down amid the treetops and roof ridges, a shadow I’d never properly considered before.’
|Granta 129
Hare in Love
Sam Coll
A wry, fanciful fable about how love can transform both nature and fate.
|Granta 129
Tourist
Andrea Stuart
‘My curiosity about lesbianism was an accomplice of my feminism: a path that allowed me to be sexual and free.’
|Granta 129
Living Goddess
Isabella Tree
‘I longed to know what she was thinking, what she did all day when she wasn’t performing rituals.’
