Granta 82: Life's Like That

Granta: The Magazine of New Writing #82

by Ian Jack (Editor)

Like what exactly? Like always ready to surprise you on the stairs, like wishing you had only known; like wanting it to go on for rather longer. This issue of Granta contains lessons drawn from the muddle of experience. With Simon Gray on smoking, absent friends, smoking, getting old and why Gary Cooper walked the way he did; Lynn Barber on the conman who seduced her, and then her parents; Kathryn Chetkovich on living with envy, bred by a partner who is more successful than she is; plus new fiction by Nell Freudenberger, Bill Gaston, J. Robert Lennon, Paul Murray and Jayne Anne Phillips; and Tim Judah on the last Jews of Baghdad.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Essays, Anthologies

Paperback

First published July 1, 2003

About the author

Ian Jack is a British journalist and writer who has edited the Independent on Sunday and the literary magazine Granta and now writes regularly for The Guardian.

Reviews

[Aaron Makepeace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Contributions from Gray, Chetkovich & Murray are the standout works in this issue.

[MacDara Conroy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great stories by Tim Judah and Nell Freudenberger make this one worth a gander. Otherwise, it didn't do much for me. (Maybe I'm being unfair; Granta is much more a magazine than it is a book. But still...)

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for Lynn Barber's "An Education" (which gave me a lot of respect for Nick Hornby's script adaptation), but also loved the amazing photo essay and Simon Gray's essay on smoking.