Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 44: The Last Place on Earth
Summer 1993
When the time comes – our appointment, our dark hour – what thoughts will we have? Tracy Kidder’s fable-like account of old age; Mary Karr on her terrifying Grandma Moore; and the first publication of Bruce Chatwin’s notebooks. Plus: Paul Auster, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ivan Klìma, and Tobias Wolff.
From this Issue
|Granta 44
The Last Place on Earth
Tracy Kidder
‘The living-room windows begin to reflect the lights on the plastic Christmas tree, and the view through those windows is fading, the woods growing thicker, the birches glowing in the dusk.’
|Granta 44
Grandma Moore’s Cancer
Mary Karr
‘Those are only rumours of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. And it knows your name.’
|Granta 44
The Bank Manager
Charles Glass
‘In the south of France, at the edge of a cove that cannot be reached by road, lives an old woman from England.’
|Granta 44
L,U,C,I,E
Nadine Gordimer
‘I correct the spelling because I’m a lawyer and I’m accustomed to precision in language; in legal documents the displacement of a comma can change the intention expressed in a sentence and lead to new litigation.’
|Granta 44
Pictures from the War
Thomas Kern
‘Kern’s achievement is to have captured this despair, and the confusion of ordinary people forced to live and love and die in the middle of a battlefield.’
|Granta 44
Dancing in Cambodia
Amitav Ghosh
‘The only person I ever met who knew both Princess Soumphady and King Sisowath was a dancer named Chea Samy. She was said to be one of the Cambodia’s greatest dancers, a national treasure. She was also Pol Pot’s sister-in-law.’
|Granta 44
A Childhood in Terezin
Ivan Klíma
‘I am trying to reach, in memory, a time before the war began.’
|Granta 44
Chatwin Revisited
Paul Theroux
‘He was such a darter he seldom stayed still long enough for anyone to sum him up.’
|Granta 44
The Road to Ouidah
Bruce Chatwin
‘Sweat, fruit, dust. The stunted goats. On the beach the straight line of white breakers, a pale blue sea, the colour almost of the sky. The bleached hulls of the pirogues. The blown coconut palms.’
