Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 27: Death
Summer 1989
A story becomes a story once it has an ending, and there is no ending more powerful than death. But what of death itself? Here, fourteen writers and photographers set out to look at it: John Gregory Dunne, Adam Mars-Jones, Mary McCarthy, Edmund White, Louise Erdrich, Michael Ignatieff, John Treherne, and eerie death faces by photographer Rudolph Schäfer.
From this Issue
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Glitches
John Gregory Dunne
‘I prefer not to speculate about what might have happened if I had not taken the ECG.’
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A Fight in Bethnal Green
Jeremy Harding
‘There was no sizing up, no graceful footwork, none of the rhetoric of the game: this was unmitigated invective.’
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Emergency Room
Eugene Richards
‘I saw cuts, burns, broken limbs, heart attacks, and then, what's inside the human body.’
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Skinned Alive
Edmund White
‘Once in a very great while he referred to me playfully as his ‘husband’, despite his revulsion against camp.’
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Letters to My Father, Now Dead
Teresa Pàmies
‘I was glad to see General Pavel at your funeral, Father.’
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Summers in Norfolk
Roger Garfitt
‘I watch her arms as she moves about the room, almost in love with their colour.’
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Deficits
Michael Ignatieff
‘Memory is what reconciles us to the future. Because she has no past, her future rushes towards her, a bat's wing brushing against her face in the dark.’
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A History
William Cooper
‘She was fighting for breath, fighting to live, perhaps fighting not to leave us.’
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Dead Faces
Rudolf Schäfer
‘These pictures show what will surely become of us all one day.’
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Robinson
Chris Petit
‘One afternoon I woke up in a porno cinema with no memory of getting there.’
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Old Man Potchikoo
Louise Erdrich
‘But Potchikoo claims that his father is the sun in heaven that shines down on us all.’
