Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 137
Autumn 2016
What leads us to accept a particular belief, credo or fact? What’s the difference between conviction, groupthink and madness? And when should we start asking questions? This issue looks at cults, faiths and ideologies, and asks how they turn us into followers.
Cover photography © Eamonn Doyle / Neutral Grey
From this Issue
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The Sufferings of this Present Time Are Not Worthy to Be Compared With the Glory Which Shall Be Revealed in Us
Matilda Gustavsson
A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not...
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The Shepherds
Lauren Hough
‘Our pasts are so unbelievable we need a witness for our own memory.’
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Bad Faith
Ken Follett
‘Every sect needs jargon. We did not have churches, we had halls; services were called meetings; the congregation was the assembly; elders were overseers’
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Blue Sky Days
Tomas van Houtryve & Eliza Griswold
‘For those caught beneath its thrum, there’s no comfort that the drone, and whoever is at its helm in America, is only targeting the bad guys.’ Eliza Griswold introduces Tomas van Houtryve's unsettling photo-essay taken by drones coming close to civilian life in the manner of the drones currently deployed in Afghanistan.
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The Interpreters: Among the Brahmins of Benares
Aatish Taseer
‘That first sight of the city curled around the river goes through me like the breath of something old and known and familiar.’ Aatish Taseer revisits Varanasi.
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Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard
Ivan Chistyakov
‘Freedom, even with hunger and cold, is still precious and irreplaceable.’
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Your Youth
Kelly Schirmann
‘I have never been in love / with so many variants of nothing.’
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To Live and Die in South Korea
Françoise Huguier & A.M. Homes
‘Blow the candle out, taste the darkness and come back changed.’
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Enjaracon Sponaeda
Will Alexander
‘how can all the pressures of surveillance / fail to describe me?’
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Julie’s Life
Emmanuel Carrère & Darcy Padilla
‘Even today, she still speaks with emotion about Dorian, the transsexual so proud of her breasts, Diane, who weighed only sixty-five pounds, and Steven, who was so frightened of dying alone that Darcy wished she could promise to be with him when the time came.’ Emmanuel Carrère on addiction and poverty in an forgotten America.
