Granta 58: Ambition

Granta: The Magazine of New Writing #58

by Ian Jack (Editor), Doris Lessing (Contributor), Paul Auster (Contributor)

I want, therefore I am.

The cry of children down the ages (I want! I want!) turns out to be the cry of adults also. The things we desire — love, money, wisdom, power — have not changed since the world began, but it seems we want more of them, and now.

But what if we get what we hope for? What if we don't?

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Anthologies

256 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1997

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

[Georgia Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a book on how to make your first million. But rich in other ways. How can you go wrong with writing by Joyce Carol Oates, Doris Lessing, George Steiner, and Paul Auster?

[Edmund Catlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

As usual, Granta finds thoughtful, sly ways to approach a theme that has ample opportunity to be trite and exhausted.

I was tickled by how much of it was about aspiring to write, and was especially gotten by the line about how it's impossible to describe how hard and ethereal it is to even attempt to be a writer.

That said, I liked this issue and found it refreshing to remember how many forms ambition takes, how it can charge outward toward the external world or mine internally for emotional, creative, etc. ambitions.

Good good.

[Eleanor Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bit of a mixed bag, I enjoyed some and others not so much

[Christi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ambition is filled with short memoirs. If memoirs are all the rage, then this is probably a collection of some of the best that memoirs can hope to be. I'm not generally a fan of this genre since it usually ends up being a case of these are all the reasons I'm such an asshole or a book of name-dropping or as in Mr. Clinton's case, a case study into from where one's initiatives were born. Boring. Each of these, however, are short enough to be about the most interesting parts of a person's life and are as close to a good story from a stranger as I've read.

[Hairy Toad · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Few of these jobs paid, but they all brought in something, and if I didn’t have great stocks of food in my refrigerator, I was rarely without a pack of cigarettes in my pocket."

I loved this line. With that in mind, I loved this little memoir. It was done right: never did I really pity the author, or find myself drained by the narrow narrative and self-indulgence most memoirs collapse into. It didn't wrap itself up neatly either. It was sweet and real and I'll remember it.

[Iva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful collection of essays by known and unknown authors. A variety of subjects covered; not all struck me as being about ambition. (Though lack of it can certainly count.) Strong writing.