Granta 168: Significant Other

Granta: The Magazine of New Writing #168

by Thomas Meaney

With a focus on energetic and voice-driven fiction, our summer issue will be centred on crushes, companionship, delusion and devastation. Kevin Brazil, Victor Heringer and Alexandra Tanner, among others, query what it means to refract ourselves through others and have our identities designed, upheld or crushed by the people we love. In non-fiction, Snigdha Poonam writes on sectarian tensions in India and the construction of a temple on India's most religiously fraught piece of land.

Genres: Nonfiction, Short Stories

380 pages, Paperback

Published July 23, 2024

Reviews

[Paul Dembina · Rating 3 out of 5]

The usual mixed bag.

I liked JM Coetzee's The Museum Guide plus 2 of the non-fiction pieces (The Messiah of Cadoxton & Literature Without Literature)

[Filip Wijnings · Rating 4 out of 5]

vreemde Jaeggy, schitterende Coetzee en nooit gedacht dat mysticisme zo'n gelaagd historisch knooppunt was.

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boring, plotless stories with unmemorable characters.

Non-fiction is even more boring to the extent that it’s mind-numbing.

The ten pieces in this issue make you ask ten times, ‘What did I just read, and why?’

[Chris]

While there were a few pieces here that didn’t move me, I loved Mary Gaitskill’s “memoir” of her Pneuma practice. I enjoyed most of the poetry in this issue, was interested in reading about the Spiritualists in England around the turn of the last century, The reportage about mining in Western Africa was a reminder of the wearisome global extraction process that was the theme of the last issue of Granta.
I read my online subscription and, on my iPad, the photos reproduce poorly, so I’ll wait by my mailbox to fully appreciate this issue.

[Ben Wasson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Standouts are Collins’ “Private View,” a compressed and compelling autofiction; Lorentzen’s criticism “Literature without Literature,” which affirms writers’ individuality amidst the corporatization of their industry; Pogue’s reportage on the mining, politics, and nomads of Mauritania that manages to feel both investigative and incidental; and Heringer’s short story “Lígia,” a troubled glance at death in the modern age.

[Ray Quirolgico · Rating 5 out of 5]

The explanation of the origin of the term that titles this issue of GRANTA is a helpful introduction for the works it contains: the human need to find comfort and solace and connection with something or Simeon beyond the self. The stories and photographs and essays in this issue are really diverse and all convey that sense of longing quite well.

[Victoria & David Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

A goodly assortment: most everything was of interest and a few things were downright wonderful.
(a highlight is the 94 year old Rosalind Fox Solomon's photographic self portraits as she has aged: many nude, many unflattering, some downright ugly, and then the last: clad in white panties, black socks and black brassiere crouched in a fighter's stance; old, defiant, beautiful.)

[David Pitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The short fiction snapped. I thought JM Coetzee's piece was pretty mid. Top rec: Diane (Avigayl Sharp)

Thought the essays were boring for the most part. Top rec: Gold Fever in the Coup Belt (James Pogue)

Loved all the poems. Favorite was the one/set by Darwish.

[Sandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

From what I remember, before the book went inexplicably AWOL, the first two or three articles were enjoyable. After some weeks I was glad to note its reappearance, but pleasure quickly fled as I found so much irritatingly smug and tedious. Time, once again, me thinks, to cancel my subscription.

[Marcus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some excellent pieces eg Coetzee, Collins, Poonam

[Paul van Zwieten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some very good stories, reportage and foto essays, others OK or hm. Standouts Coetzee, Poonan, Pogue, Heringer and Fox Solomon.

[Johan Sanders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een van de betere nummers; Coetzee, Collins, Brazil en Gaitskill konden me bekoren.

[Shazza Hoppsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Glad I read it for the first story by Coetzee but so many of the stories after that are forgettable.

[Siobhan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was disappointed by this issue, in which most of the pieces were quite dull and pretentious, and there was only a few interesting things said in relation to the theme of 'significant other'.