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← Back to all issuesGranta 168: Significant Other
Summer 2024
In Granta 168: Significant Other we consider the people who shape our sense of ourselves and reflect on the connections and encounters that inform a life.
Featuring essays and memoir by Mary Gaitskill, Susan Pedersen, James Pogue and Snigdha Poonam, as well as criticism from Christian Lorentzen.
Fiction by Kevin Brazil, J.M. Coetzee, Sophie Collins, Victor Heringer (translated by James Young), Fleur Jaeggy (translated by Gini Alhadeff) and Alexandra Tanner.
Poetry by Najwan Darwish (translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid), Zoë Hitzig, Tamara Nassar and Bernadette Van-Huy.
And photography by Rosalind Fox Solomon (introduced by Lynne Tillman), Jesse Glazzard (introduced by Anthony Vahni Capildeo) and Debmalya Ray Choudhuri (introduced by John-Baptiste Oduor.
Cover artwork © Simon Casson
From this Issue
|Granta 168
The Museum Guard
J.M. Coetzee
‘Do they strike people as a strange couple? He does not know, does not care.’
Fiction by J.M. Coetzee.
|Granta 168
Private View
Sophie Collins
‘Being recognised as part of a couple thrilled me; I felt legitimised. John had a life, a full life.’
Fiction by Sophie Collins.
|Granta 168
Embrace
Kevin Brazil
‘Love is a concept about which I have long been very sceptical. I have seen the damage that can be done, and can be justified, in the name of love.’
Fiction by Kevin Brazil.
|Granta 168
New Kindness Hatching
Jesse Glazzard & Anthony Vahni Capildeo
‘The invisible artist who invites us to stand beside him is clearly among friends; being kind, being of a kind; witnessing with-ness.’
Jesse Glazzard photographs Camp Trans, with an introduction by Anthony Vahni Capildeo.
|Granta 168
The Messiah of Cadoxton
Susan Pedersen
‘The script of script production rather followed the script of sex: it was intimate, exciting, boundary-crossing, and left the participants changed.’
Susan Pedersen on paranormal love in the Balfour family.
|Granta 168
A Woman I Once Knew
Rosalind Fox Solomon & Lynne Tillman
‘These are not gentle, passive female bodies. They are strong women who strike poses that show aggression.’
Lynne Tillman introduces Rosalind Fox Solomon’s self-portraits.
|Granta 168
A Journey to Ayodhya
Snigdha Poonam
‘Ask anyone in Ayodhya, and they will say the city’s Hindu–Muslim harmony can withstand any test.’
Snigdha Poonam on the construction of a Hindu temple on the ruins of a mosque in Utter Pradesh.
|Granta 168
Literature Without Literature
Christian Lorentzen
‘Corporate publishing is the channel through which literature happens to flow at this moment in history.’
Christian Lorentzen dissects the literary establishment.
|Granta 168
Gold Fever in the Coup Belt: The Mines of Mauritania
James Pogue
‘The whole arc of the failed promise of development became legible in the traces of the gold rush.’
James Pogue reports from the gold mines of Mauritania.
|Granta 168
The Pneuma Illusion
Mary Gaitskill
‘The intensity of it seemed in retrospect something inexplicable, like a sudden opening in the sky with an outpouring of visions.’
Mary Gaitskill on her experiences with Pneuma therapy.
