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Granta: The Magazine of New Writing #166
Granta 166: Generations
Baby-boomers, gen-X, millennials, the dividing lines among generations in literary culture have become stark to the point of parody. Granta 166 tests the limits of each generation's given definition in popular culture against the reality of its most sharply observed fiction.
Stories by Andrew O'Hagan, Brandon Taylor, Nico Walker and Lillian Fishman fill an issue that captures the change in values, aesthetic emphasis and technological experience among different age cohorts, all the while questioning the legitimacy of the generational conceit. Non-fiction includes meditations on the short history of the idea of 'a generation', as well as on the relative absence of youth revolts in our time, and the shadowy rule of the old - gerontocracy - in societies across the globe.
Stories by Andrew O'Hagan, Brandon Taylor, Nico Walker and Lillian Fishman fill an issue that captures the change in values, aesthetic emphasis and technological experience among different age cohorts, all the while questioning the legitimacy of the generational conceit. Non-fiction includes meditations on the short history of the idea of 'a generation', as well as on the relative absence of youth revolts in our time, and the shadowy rule of the old - gerontocracy - in societies across the globe.
320 pages, Paperback
Published February 13, 2024
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September 21, 2024
This issue, called ‘Generations’ has its strength in its closing pages, much as we’d like the closing years of our lives to have, though we might find that won’t be the case.
Gary Indiana, who the art critic for the Village Voice weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988, riffs about how our swan-song years could pan out, in a wry, melancholic study of geriatric aches and pains, ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’. Here even the truth hurts as much as everything else. Strangely, the back cover has many alternative titles for the pieces in this issue (they were possibly changed at the last moment) and Indiana’s piece was originally and amusingly titled ‘Past the Spitting Stage’. This immediately follows ’The Trouble With Old Men’: a simple, well written probe into gerontocracy. Whether it has value, inhibits the opportunities for the young and how sometimes its implemented barbarically. The author Samuel Moyn ends the piece with a cautionary warning; today our dotage is largely blessed with understanding, kindness and generosity, whereas in the past when the elderly had no viability as useful citizens they were expected to take their own life, or allow others to do so, much in the way they shoot horses.
I suspect the intent of ‘Generations’ was to start with youth and progress to senescence, which if so didn’t entirely work out, unlike the piece ‘Lifetimes of the Soviet Union’, by Yuri Slezkine, that achieves this (though in reverse like Benjamin Button) with an interesting account of the USSR that existed only the duration of a single lifetime. We read about how revolutionary zeal diminished from one generation to the next as the rule of the Soviet Union that started with strictly ideological Bolsheviks passed to their children and grandchildren who saw no value in the autocratic politburos of the USSR, and their self-inflicted wounds, and eventually led to its death like a senile old man.
There’s some good writing here, not least the extract from ‘Yr Dead’, by Sam Sax, that made me buy the book: it’s humane, has humility, and is gently told, but I found the quality of some of these pieces to be poor. Mostly the fiction or memoir was either naïve (unforgivable for a magazine of Granta’s quality), banal or inconsequential, mostly not well written with the exception of ‘Isabel’, by Lillian Fishman, that reads as smooth as Diana’s touch between Lucy’s thighs, though in the end this piece feels like a literary Mills & Boon for intellectuals. The very low nadir was an extract from ‘Ricks & Hern’, a genre-esque pile of piffle whose inclusion seemed only to satisfy the generational theme.
Putting the issue of Granta's fiction to one side, the magazine seems to increasingly take the intellectual high ground among literary journals (along with those bastions, The New Yorker, Harpers and The Atlantic) by moving into intellectual enquiry and commentary with nonfiction by scholars rather than creative nonfiction by authors. Though the content of this nonfiction is admirable sometimes the pieces are dry, scholarly and at times do not read easily; they can be ponderous and pedantic. I found that ‘Niamey Nights’, by Rahmane Idrissa, to be the biggest culprit, but that shouldn’t put you off, though now and again it rambles, the exposé of African values versus Western hegemony is fascinating. He talks of West African politics, revolution, Islam and culture around Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso in the 80s, where:
‘It was a Promethean moment, the time of the founding fathers who found the fire of modern knowledge in the schools of the modern colonizer and wanted to give it to those who lived in an orbicular distance from the capitals of modernity. They wanted them to stand up and become equal to all modern souls.’
He adds:
’From the sixties to the eighties, the meta-historic map promised a modern future that might be bourgeoise or Communist but would in any case be materially munificent - and humanised by a dose of Africa. In the nineties, the liberal-democratic billboards the triumphant West briefly captured some imaginations, and an Islamist fast-track to the Caliphate (‘Islam is the Solution’ was a slogan of those days) pulled others, at least in Niger and Mali, much less in Burkina Faso. The spirit of my generation became a middle ground in which a fusion, or rather a confusion, of these conflicting maps was attempted, as if people were going to live in a place that would be at the same time France and Saudi Arabia, without the affluence of either.’
And if after reading the last few issues of Granta you believe they’ve abdicated their responsibility towards fiction, take a look at the poetry. Two poems in the dying pages of this magazine is all we're offered. It gives the impression that the editorial influence is moving away from lyricism, creativity and imagination towards hard facts, current affairs and world issues. Whatever, it’s their magazine, and if it’s not one’s bag there are plenty of other excellent literary magazines for all tastes. Perhaps there aren’t enough magazines like Granta; sometimes I wonder if the balance of my reading could be a little more grounded in reality. Well, I’m not entirely sure about that.
Gary Indiana, who the art critic for the Village Voice weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988, riffs about how our swan-song years could pan out, in a wry, melancholic study of geriatric aches and pains, ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’. Here even the truth hurts as much as everything else. Strangely, the back cover has many alternative titles for the pieces in this issue (they were possibly changed at the last moment) and Indiana’s piece was originally and amusingly titled ‘Past the Spitting Stage’. This immediately follows ’The Trouble With Old Men’: a simple, well written probe into gerontocracy. Whether it has value, inhibits the opportunities for the young and how sometimes its implemented barbarically. The author Samuel Moyn ends the piece with a cautionary warning; today our dotage is largely blessed with understanding, kindness and generosity, whereas in the past when the elderly had no viability as useful citizens they were expected to take their own life, or allow others to do so, much in the way they shoot horses.
I suspect the intent of ‘Generations’ was to start with youth and progress to senescence, which if so didn’t entirely work out, unlike the piece ‘Lifetimes of the Soviet Union’, by Yuri Slezkine, that achieves this (though in reverse like Benjamin Button) with an interesting account of the USSR that existed only the duration of a single lifetime. We read about how revolutionary zeal diminished from one generation to the next as the rule of the Soviet Union that started with strictly ideological Bolsheviks passed to their children and grandchildren who saw no value in the autocratic politburos of the USSR, and their self-inflicted wounds, and eventually led to its death like a senile old man.
There’s some good writing here, not least the extract from ‘Yr Dead’, by Sam Sax, that made me buy the book: it’s humane, has humility, and is gently told, but I found the quality of some of these pieces to be poor. Mostly the fiction or memoir was either naïve (unforgivable for a magazine of Granta’s quality), banal or inconsequential, mostly not well written with the exception of ‘Isabel’, by Lillian Fishman, that reads as smooth as Diana’s touch between Lucy’s thighs, though in the end this piece feels like a literary Mills & Boon for intellectuals. The very low nadir was an extract from ‘Ricks & Hern’, a genre-esque pile of piffle whose inclusion seemed only to satisfy the generational theme.
Putting the issue of Granta's fiction to one side, the magazine seems to increasingly take the intellectual high ground among literary journals (along with those bastions, The New Yorker, Harpers and The Atlantic) by moving into intellectual enquiry and commentary with nonfiction by scholars rather than creative nonfiction by authors. Though the content of this nonfiction is admirable sometimes the pieces are dry, scholarly and at times do not read easily; they can be ponderous and pedantic. I found that ‘Niamey Nights’, by Rahmane Idrissa, to be the biggest culprit, but that shouldn’t put you off, though now and again it rambles, the exposé of African values versus Western hegemony is fascinating. He talks of West African politics, revolution, Islam and culture around Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso in the 80s, where:
‘It was a Promethean moment, the time of the founding fathers who found the fire of modern knowledge in the schools of the modern colonizer and wanted to give it to those who lived in an orbicular distance from the capitals of modernity. They wanted them to stand up and become equal to all modern souls.’
He adds:
’From the sixties to the eighties, the meta-historic map promised a modern future that might be bourgeoise or Communist but would in any case be materially munificent - and humanised by a dose of Africa. In the nineties, the liberal-democratic billboards the triumphant West briefly captured some imaginations, and an Islamist fast-track to the Caliphate (‘Islam is the Solution’ was a slogan of those days) pulled others, at least in Niger and Mali, much less in Burkina Faso. The spirit of my generation became a middle ground in which a fusion, or rather a confusion, of these conflicting maps was attempted, as if people were going to live in a place that would be at the same time France and Saudi Arabia, without the affluence of either.’
And if after reading the last few issues of Granta you believe they’ve abdicated their responsibility towards fiction, take a look at the poetry. Two poems in the dying pages of this magazine is all we're offered. It gives the impression that the editorial influence is moving away from lyricism, creativity and imagination towards hard facts, current affairs and world issues. Whatever, it’s their magazine, and if it’s not one’s bag there are plenty of other excellent literary magazines for all tastes. Perhaps there aren’t enough magazines like Granta; sometimes I wonder if the balance of my reading could be a little more grounded in reality. Well, I’m not entirely sure about that.
July 31, 2024
"The Soviet Union lasted one human lifetime. It was born in 1917 and died in 1991, at the age of seventy-four. The difficult Civil-War childhood was followed by precocious ‘construction-of-socialism’ adolescence, Great-Patriotic-War youth, ‘postwar-reconstruction’ maturity, Khrushchev-Thaw midlife crisis, and ‘period-of-stagnation’ dotage culminating in a series of colds, frenzied CPR attempts, and death ‘after a protracted illness’.
Such an obituary works as a metaphor and a draft of a biography. It seems to make sense because the Bolshevik ‘party of a new type’ was not an organization seeking power within a particular state but a faith-based group radically opposed to a corrupt world, devoted to ‘the abandoned and the persecuted’, composed of voluntary members who had undergone a personal conversion, and dedicated to the total and immediate destruction of the ‘old world’ of suffering and injustice. It was, by most definitions, an apocalyptic sect awaiting an all-consuming revolutionary Armageddon followed by the millennial reign of Communist brotherhood as the overcoming of the futility and contingency of human existence." Yuri Slezkine
The always reliable Granta.
Such an obituary works as a metaphor and a draft of a biography. It seems to make sense because the Bolshevik ‘party of a new type’ was not an organization seeking power within a particular state but a faith-based group radically opposed to a corrupt world, devoted to ‘the abandoned and the persecuted’, composed of voluntary members who had undergone a personal conversion, and dedicated to the total and immediate destruction of the ‘old world’ of suffering and injustice. It was, by most definitions, an apocalyptic sect awaiting an all-consuming revolutionary Armageddon followed by the millennial reign of Communist brotherhood as the overcoming of the futility and contingency of human existence." Yuri Slezkine
The always reliable Granta.
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March 14, 2024Loved most of the pieces in this Granta. The reflections on “generations” coincided with ideas from my other recent readings, “…Roger Federer” and “In Praise of Failure”. Most memorable were the piece on James Joyce’s grandchild and executor, Stephen James Joyce, and Samuel Moyn’s work on gerontocracy.
March 22, 2024
Nachdem mir der neue Herausgeber von Granta magazine, Thomas Meaney, mit der ersten von ihm verantworteten Ausgabe Deutschland gleichmal das Kraut ausgeschüttet hatte, freue ich mich umso mehr, wie gut mir die aktuelle Ausgabe zum Thema Generations gefiel (angefangen mit dem großartigen Titelbild). Zwar sank mein Herz, als sein Vorwort zunächst die Generationen-Einteilung Boomers, Gen X, Millennials etc. aufgriff (halte ich für unbrauchbar für nützliche Analysen, und die Forschung gibt mir recht), doch dann las ich schlaue Gedanken darüber, welche Einflüsse und Merkmale die zugehörigen Schriftsteller*innen vereinen.
Die Zusammenstellung der Texte für das Magazin selbst spielt das Thema Generations ganz anders und erkenntnisfördernd durch. Unter anderem: Guy Gunaratne gibt einem Einwanderer der ersten Generation in London die Stimme, mit der er seine Tochter anspricht, vor allem darauf, wie anders ihre Einwanderungs-Identität ist. Eine Geschichte, "Isabel" von Lillian Fishman, stellt eine heutige lesbische Beziehung ihrem Vorläufer vor 20 Jahren gegenüber. "Lifetimes of the Soviet Union" von Yuri Slezkine schildert die verschiedenen Generationen politischer Strömungen der Sowjetunion. In "The Full Package" von Zoe Dubno geht eine Teenagerin mit ihrer Großmutter Kleidungkaufen, "Ricks & Hern" von Nico Walker erzählt von zwei Polizisten in New York, einer davon alt, einer jung, in "The Trouble with Old Men" schildert Samuel Moyn, wie verschiedene Kulturen und Zivilisationen durch die Menschheitsgeschichte ihre Ältesten behandelt haben, von Verehrung bis systematischem Mord .
Und ich habe den Fotografen Kalpesh Lathigra entdeckt, auf instagram @kalpeshlathigra. (Huch, der folgte gleich zurück!)
Das alles zeichnet ein Bild von der Dynamik unterschiedlicher Generationen, ihrer Wirkung aufeinander - bunt und bereichernd.
Die Zusammenstellung der Texte für das Magazin selbst spielt das Thema Generations ganz anders und erkenntnisfördernd durch. Unter anderem: Guy Gunaratne gibt einem Einwanderer der ersten Generation in London die Stimme, mit der er seine Tochter anspricht, vor allem darauf, wie anders ihre Einwanderungs-Identität ist. Eine Geschichte, "Isabel" von Lillian Fishman, stellt eine heutige lesbische Beziehung ihrem Vorläufer vor 20 Jahren gegenüber. "Lifetimes of the Soviet Union" von Yuri Slezkine schildert die verschiedenen Generationen politischer Strömungen der Sowjetunion. In "The Full Package" von Zoe Dubno geht eine Teenagerin mit ihrer Großmutter Kleidungkaufen, "Ricks & Hern" von Nico Walker erzählt von zwei Polizisten in New York, einer davon alt, einer jung, in "The Trouble with Old Men" schildert Samuel Moyn, wie verschiedene Kulturen und Zivilisationen durch die Menschheitsgeschichte ihre Ältesten behandelt haben, von Verehrung bis systematischem Mord .
Und ich habe den Fotografen Kalpesh Lathigra entdeckt, auf instagram @kalpeshlathigra. (Huch, der folgte gleich zurück!)
Das alles zeichnet ein Bild von der Dynamik unterschiedlicher Generationen, ihrer Wirkung aufeinander - bunt und bereichernd.
March 19, 2024
This collection is introduced as a series of reflections within generations, between generations, and across cultural and national boundaries that change understandings of generations. Aside from some early sociology and history lessons, the stories and poems started to feel more like explorations of age and aging, which seems at least tangentially related but slightly off-point.
April 19, 2024
Het verhaal 'Stalin, Lenin, Robespierre' vond ik het beste verhaal.
Daarnaast konden 'Isabel' van Lilian Fishman en 'The Life, Old Age and Death of a Woman of the People' van Didier Eribon me zeker ook bekoren.
Daarnaast konden 'Isabel' van Lilian Fishman en 'The Life, Old Age and Death of a Woman of the People' van Didier Eribon me zeker ook bekoren.
July 4, 2024
Several thought-provoking pieces on the subject of generations; mostly as they deal with shared, differently-experienced histories. Photograph and what inspired them interesting, but also several pieces which didn't strike any chord at all.
April 3, 2024
special shoutout to isabel by lillian fishman and five o’clock somewhere by gary indiana
April 9, 2024
Three great pieces from James Scudamore, Lillian Fishman and Vigdis Hjorth
Lot of wet naval gazing for the majority of the rest.
Still always worth value for money.
Lot of wet naval gazing for the majority of the rest.
Still always worth value for money.
April 18, 2024
Worth it for the Brandon Taylor and Vigdis Hjorth short stories alone! Also introduced me to Lillian Fishman and Rahmane Idrissa, both of whom I'd want to read more of now
December 17, 2024
Enjoyed the photography but the nature of a new writers magazine makes this a very mixed bag of chocolates.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews