Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 5: The Modern Common Wind
Spring 1982
The theme of this issue is the habitability of the earth, and it is in this context, not in the context of the direct slaughter of hundreds of millions of people by the local effects of nuclear weapons, that the question of human survival arises. Includes essays and fiction by Susan Sontag, Russell Hoban, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Leonard Michaels and Jonathan Schell.
From this Issue
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Mnemosyne, Teen Taals, and Tottenham Court Road
Russell Hoban
‘Music is a puissant recaller of time past; music is memory's sister and for its very life relies on memory to hold in our minds the passage of sounds through time.’
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Mungo Among the Moors
T. Coraghessan Boyle
‘At an age when most young Scotsmen were lifting skirts, ploughing furrows and spreading seed, Mungo Park was displaying his bare buttocks to al-haff Ali Ibn Fatoudi, Emir of Ludamar.’
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Keepers Of The House
Lisa St Aubin de Terán
‘Lydia Sinclair was just seventeen when she arrived on her husband's estate in the Andes.’ Lisa St Aubin de Terán's fictional memoir.
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The Anatomy Of Desire
John L’Heureux
‘He kissed her and caressed her and felt young and whole again. He did not miss his wife and children. He did not miss his skin.’
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The Salt Wife
Ted Mooney
'Martha worked in a radio-biology lab in Manhattan, and when Larry, her husband of seven years, left her at last for the cause of art, she decided to accept a long-standing invitation from a lab in Los Angeles to visit their operation and talk about her work.'
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The Dead Girls
Jorge Ibargüengoitia
'For years it seemed like God was with them. While my husband and Iost everything three times through honest work, my sisters were getting rich off immorality.'
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Footplacers, London Transport, Owls, Wincer-Boise
Russell Hoban
‘All those footsteps have been gathered up into the footplacer, all those goings are gone.’
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My Father’s Life
Leonard Michaels
‘Six days a week he rose early, dressed, ate breakfast alone, put on his hat, and walked to his barbershop at 207 Henry Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, about half a mile from our apartment.’
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Nuclear Arms And The Fate Of The Earth
Jonathan Schell
‘We have lived in the shadow of nuclear arms for more than thirty-six years, so it does not seem too soon for us to familiarize ourselves with them - to acquaint ourselves with such matters as the ‘thermal pulse’, the ‘blast wave’, and the ‘three stages of radiation sickness.’’
