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← Back to all issuesGranta 19: More Dirt
Summer 1986
The companion volume to ‘Dirty Realism’ (Granta 8): unillusioned, spare fiction of the belly-side of American life: with Richard Ford, Ellen Gilchrist, Louise Erdrich, Jayne Anne Phillips, and others. Plus: John Updike, Adam Mars-Jones, and Primo Levi.
From this Issue
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Empire
Richard Ford
‘Outside on the cold air, flames moved and divided and swarmed the sky. And Sims felt alone in a wide empire, removed and afloat, calmed, as if life was far away now, as if blackness was all around.’
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Fast Lanes
Jayne Anne Phillips
‘I was vanished, invisible, another apartment left empty behind me, my possessions given away, thrown away, packed away in taped boxes fit into an available vehicle.’
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Memphis
Ellen Gilchrist
‘He drove off in her car. He was wearing a white visor, a white shirt with long sleeves. I don't believe the world I lived to see.’
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The Contas Girl
Robert Olmstead
‘He always felt foolish after he finished making love to the Contas girl. He felt a little piece had been given up of its own will.’
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Knives
Louise Erdrich
‘It is not so complicated, not even as painful, as I feared, and it doesn't last long either. He signs when it is over, his breath hot and hollow in my ear.’
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Getting The Words Out
John Updike
‘No, it is not confrontation but some wish to avoid it, some hasty wish to please, that betrays my flow of speech.’
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Los Angeles Without A Map
Richard Rayner
‘I was a hysterical adolescent. But I was a hysterical adolescent with a credit card and there was a seat available.’
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Slim
Adam Mars-Jones
‘My African family doesn't have the money for photographs. My African family may never even have seen a photograph.’
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A True Afrikaner
Mary Benson
‘What first struck me was his courtesy: it never faltered even when some remark by the prosecutor or an action by the police angered him, hardening the expression in his blue eyes.’
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Eye For An Eye: A Chronicle of Northern Ireland (Part One)
Nan Richardson & Gilles Peress
‘Belfast. There was a sound of glass breaking all over the city and a roar. Nine bomb blasts went off simultaneously in Belfast and five other cities: Newry on the border; Armargh; Londonderry; Portadown, the industrial city; and Lisburn, the Protestant northern enclave.’
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From Lab To Writing Desk
Primo Levi
‘I had not aimed for literary celebrity, and I felt at ease with myself for having done my civic duty as a witness, and felt relieved of the burden of slavery.’
