Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 88: Mothers
Winter 2004
This issue of Granta includes Edmund White on his mother’s girdle, John McGahern on his mother’s religion and Alexandra Fuller on motherhood in Zambia.
From this Issue
|Granta 88
The View from this End
Alexandra Fuller
‘It lay like a sodden comma, curled up against its mother, and no one realised it was dead.’
|Granta 88
Motley Notes
Ian Jack
‘The last issue of Granta celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary and retraced a little of its pre-1979 history as a magazine for and by the students of Cambridge University.’
|Granta 88
The Lanes
John McGahern
‘The soil in Leitrim is poor, in places no more than an inch deep.’
|Granta 88
The Merry Widow
Edmund White
’She met my father in Texas and then they moved north, where I was born in Cincinnati.‘
|Granta 88
The Grief of Strangers
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
‘Chinechelum said little as her mother drove her to the airport.’
|Granta 88
Lily
Ian McEwan
‘He'll be ruthless with himself in his pursuit of boundless health to avoid his mother's fate: Mental death.’
|Granta 88
Mutations
Masha Gessen
‘With a disease as unpredictable as cancer, the opportunity to blame an actual person is an unexpected temptation.’
|Granta 88
The Collector
Paul Maliszewski
‘Mitchell's writing is a blueprint for a New York which was then disappearing and is now almost lost.’
|Granta 88
Mother of the Year
Paul Theroux
‘The words ‘big family’ have the same ring for me as 'savage tribe', and I now know that every big family is savage in its own way.’
|Granta 88
Notes from the Land of Nod
Jim Lewis
‘You can drink in a bar and sober up in the basement of a church, but everyone sleeps (or lies awake) in solitude.’
|Granta 88
How to Stop Your Mother-in-Law from Drowning
Richard Beard
‘This is one of those stories about she and you. She is the mother-in-law. You are the man who duped her daughter, or the woman who ensnared her son.’
