Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #112933 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Observer, Simon Garfield
"Granta is almost always an exciting and rewarding and illuminating thing to read ...Our world would be much the poorer without it"

Independent
"From Amis and Barnes ... the literary stars come out for this bumper 100th issue of the ground-breaking magazine"

Sunday Herald, Alan Taylor
"The most influential and widely read [magazine devoted to new writing] over the past two-and-a-half decades"

Customer Reviews

A disappointing conclusion to a century of Granta
Guest edited for its hundredth issue by novelist William Boyd, the thematic issues that ordinarily define Granta have been dispensed with in favour of a jamboree of some of the country's most distinguished writers. Amis, Barnes, McEwan, Rushdie, Pinter - they're all here. Fair play to Granta for getting such an array of talent, but I rather get the sense that most of these writers are trading on their names and have merely dusted down manuscripts unusable elsewhere to use as their contributions. Thus we have Ian McEwan submitting the draft (!) of a libretto he is composing. We have James Fenton writing an utterly insipid piece - with footnotes - on buying a clavichord (was this meant to be some sort of `literary' joke?). We have Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie being too clever for their own good in a short story and essay respectively. Most of this is drivel, and notwithstanding the authors reputations would normally never make it to the pages of this esteemed publication.

At the same time there are a couple of great short stories by Alan Hollinghurst and, notably, Julian Barnes. Hanif Kureishi hits the mark with a story that traverses Pakistan and England in the 1980s. A translation of Ingo Schulze's surreal story of a trip to Estonia is worth reading, while Isabel Hilton's essay on Greenland is a reminder of the terrific non-fiction for which Granta is famed. Contributions by Ian Jack, Lucy Eyre and Doris Lessing are good reads too. As such Granta 100 is not entirely without merit, but it is a maddeningly uneven read nonetheless.

There has been, I feel, a loss of direction at this great magazine over the last year or so - something that is perhaps understandable given some of the editorial upheaval behind the scenes. A new editor - Jason Cowley - takes over with Granta 101 and I am sure he will bring with it some verve and renewed impetus for the first part of its next century of issues.

Well I liked it
This is a sparkling collection of new writing from some of the literary greats, including Salman Rushdie (a brilliantly perceptive and quirky essay, starting at Heraclitus and moving to Pythagorus by way of Charlie Brown, Bob Dylan, Moby Dick and Leopold Bloom, among others); Martin Amis (with a wickedly satirical story about the future of terrorism), Hanif Kureishi (the exoticism of foreign sexuality in an excerpt from his latest book Something To Tell You); a short story by Helen Simpson (about selfishness and air travel), to name just a few of the many highlights. And Granta looks back at it's past too with the inclusion here of a some new poetry - from Lavinia Greenlaw, Don Paterson, Harold Pinter, Alice Oswald, Craig Raine, Derek Mahon, Michael Hofman and others. Marvellous!

The best short story in this edition comes from A M Homes, called May We Be Forgiven, it is an excoriating story about madness and adultery, searingly contemporary and tightly controlled, this may be one of her best pieces of writing.

Taken in total, I thought this edition, while it may not be the finest collection of contemporary writing to emerge from Granta so far, bodes well for its future success. William Boyd did a great job.

A decent landmark issue
Being issue 100 and considering the departure of Editor Ian Jack, this was never going to be a 'normal' issue of Granta.
While there is still the usual array of fiction, non-fiction and photo-essay here, poetry is also thrown into the mix here, to varied effect.
Like the other reviwer, I agree that the Julian Barnes and Hanif Kureishi pieces are exemplary, although I must disagree and say that I thoroughly enjoyed the Rushdie and challenging Amis, a writer who seems to have got over his early-twentieth century dip in form.
The quality is a bit mixed, but it is good, and worthwhile, to see the names in this issue that have made Granta what it is today, even if they won't make it what it seems to be becoming under Cowley's editorship (which has begun with a stunning new, much more modern look - although this does ruin the look of rows of Granta on the bookshelves a little).
There are some new faces here, notably Tash Aw, and Helen Oyeyemi (whose piece I found a little disappointing, having not read her before but heard a lot about her prodigious talent).
I think this issue marks a sign-off to an era of Granta, issuing in the new without burning the bridges that make its past so notable. Here's to the next hundred issues.