The Dimensions of a Cave | Granta

  • Published: 26/10/2023
  • ISBN: 9781783782024
  • Granta Books
  • 480 pages

The Dimensions of a Cave

Greg Jackson

When reporter Quentin Jones investigates a shadowy military programme during the desert war, he discovers cutting edge technology that simulates reality during interrogation. As the shadowy labyrinth of governmental corruption unfurls and tightens around him, unnerving links to his protégé Bruce keep emerging, who disappeared into the war several years earlier.

The Dimensions of A Cave is a haunting journey into networks of power and corruption, exploring our drive towards war and obsession with new technologies. A modern day retelling of Heart of Darkness, this masterful debut novel heralds a dazzling and singular voice in fiction.

A very contemporary story about surveillance capitalism, virtual reality, and 21st-century forever war, [that] will still be read a century from now for the news it brings about the timeless riddle of the human self. It's increasingly rare these days to find a novelist with Greg Jackson's world-swallowing ambition, and rarer still for one to make good on that ambition as gloriously as Jackson does here

Christopher Beha

Greg Jackson's prose is sly, wise, and almost self-consciously heroic, undaunted by the present moment, though it threatens to be our last

Joshua Cohen

Greg Jackson is an athletically talented writer who packs so much into every single sentence and scene it almost scares me. His debut novel is somehow both a hardboiled thriller and a philosophical treaty with dialogues that would make Sorkin blush

Catherine Lacey

The Author

Greg Jackson has been a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, MacDowell Colony, and the University of Virginia’s MFA program. A winner of the Balch and Henfield Prizes and a finalist for the 2014 National Magazine Award in Fiction, his short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, and VQR.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

Prodigals

Greg Jackson

Adrift in lives of possibility and limitation, the flawed, struggling and sympathetic characters of these desperate, eerie stories seek refuge from meaninglessness and boredom in love, art, friendship, drugs, and sex. A journalist is either the guest or captive of a reclusive former tennis star at his mansion in the French hills; a terrible storm forces a man and a woman, who may be his therapist, to flee New York together; the artistic ambitions of a banker are laid bare when he comes under the influence of two strange sisters.

Unflinching, funny and profound, Prodigals maps the degradations of contemporary life – from the deification of celebrity, to the impotence of violence, to the psychological debts of privilege, to the loss of grand narratives – with unusual insight, sincerity, and passion. It is a fiercely honest and heartfelt look at what we have become, the comedy of our foibles, and our longing for home.

Greg Jackson on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

Notes on Craft

Greg Jackson

‘It is hard to devote yourself to something that makes you feel constantly like an amateur.’

Greg Jackson on writing and teaching fiction.

In Conversation | The Online Edition

Greg Jackson | Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists

Greg Jackson & Luke Neima

‘A lot of writing is confronting your own failure, again and again and again’

Fiction | Granta 139

Country & Eastern

Greg Jackson

‘Anyone could find courage when the World-Historical Spirit had selected you to enact your martyrdom on the Six O’Clock News. But in the shadows, in secret, unrecognized?’