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Granta: The Magazine of New Writing #27
Granta 27: Death
Granta 27: Death
256 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1989
2 people are currently reading
49 people want to read
About the author
Bill Buford
98 books322 followersWilliam Holmes Buford is an American author and journalist. He is the author of the books Among the Thugs and Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. Buford was previously the fiction editor for The New Yorker, where he is still on staff. For sixteen years, he was the editor of Granta, which he relaunched in 1979. He is also credited with coining the term "dirty realism".
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 24, 2025
A great thrift store find. I really enjoyed reading this anthology over the past few weeks. Some of the pieces affected me deeply.
March 31, 2020
There was only one review in here before mine and it didn't do this Granta issue justice. There is a certain nerdish thrill in reading Granta retrospectively. It's like picking up old magazines in the a very old dentists surgery. Except I am absolutely sure that there's no dentist surgery anywhere in the world that would have old Grantas.
This issue was published the summer of 1989 with Bill Buford as the editor. Some stories are memoir so from a 2020 viewpoint, you drop back 30 years and then back another 20 into memories of people. Every story has a death told in very different ways. Some are stories are post-death and some are memoirs of lives leading up to death such as Michael Ignatieff story of his mother's Alzheimers. They are all about real deaths as opposed to the famous deaths in literature and films such as Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. These stories are recognizable to anyone who has experienced death. Real death doesn't have an accompanying orchestra to come on the appropriate time. You can't summon up Mozart's Lacrimosa from his Requiem to accompany the real experience of death.
The ads seem deliberately crude. Not much poetry. More hard core reporting. Just three women contributors. This was 1989 and it's unbelievable how macho and Hemingwayesque it is.
The first story is a boxing match where one boxer doesn't get up and turns cold. All you can hear at the end is the wailing of his widow. The AIDS Epidemic was in in full flight and a scary death sentence. Adam Mars Jones tells a great story about his partner in hospital.
John Gregory Dunne writes about his heart condition. That's a great story for anyone listening to their heart for various anomalies and wondering is it about to stop. He died 14 years later inspiring his wife Joan Didion to write The Year of Magical Thinking.
There's a photo piece of emergency rooms where the outcome was less that satisfactory ie dead. Pictures of dead people in coffins beds or wherever all very much reposing.
Mary McCarthy was a communist in the 1930s and wrote her contribution to this issue just before she died in 1989. It's a very honest memoir of two relationships in the 1930s. People can be more honest when close to death but did she know? She was 77 when she wrote it.
Roger Garfitt recalls growing up with his grandparents in Norfolk. Brilliant because its an unimaginable life in today's throwaway fast moving world. Garfitt later wrote a book called The Horseman's Word about growing up in rural Norfolk. Published in 2011. Good for Granta to spot that gem forming 20 years ahead of publication.
Christopher Petit's Robinson is an extract from an upcoming book. Benefit of 2020 hindsight says the book wasn't that memorable.
Louise Erdrich has a native American story of death and resurrection over-using magic realism as a technique. Hard to buy into that in a short story.
This issue was published the summer of 1989 with Bill Buford as the editor. Some stories are memoir so from a 2020 viewpoint, you drop back 30 years and then back another 20 into memories of people. Every story has a death told in very different ways. Some are stories are post-death and some are memoirs of lives leading up to death such as Michael Ignatieff story of his mother's Alzheimers. They are all about real deaths as opposed to the famous deaths in literature and films such as Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. These stories are recognizable to anyone who has experienced death. Real death doesn't have an accompanying orchestra to come on the appropriate time. You can't summon up Mozart's Lacrimosa from his Requiem to accompany the real experience of death.
The ads seem deliberately crude. Not much poetry. More hard core reporting. Just three women contributors. This was 1989 and it's unbelievable how macho and Hemingwayesque it is.
The first story is a boxing match where one boxer doesn't get up and turns cold. All you can hear at the end is the wailing of his widow. The AIDS Epidemic was in in full flight and a scary death sentence. Adam Mars Jones tells a great story about his partner in hospital.
John Gregory Dunne writes about his heart condition. That's a great story for anyone listening to their heart for various anomalies and wondering is it about to stop. He died 14 years later inspiring his wife Joan Didion to write The Year of Magical Thinking.
There's a photo piece of emergency rooms where the outcome was less that satisfactory ie dead. Pictures of dead people in coffins beds or wherever all very much reposing.
Mary McCarthy was a communist in the 1930s and wrote her contribution to this issue just before she died in 1989. It's a very honest memoir of two relationships in the 1930s. People can be more honest when close to death but did she know? She was 77 when she wrote it.
Roger Garfitt recalls growing up with his grandparents in Norfolk. Brilliant because its an unimaginable life in today's throwaway fast moving world. Garfitt later wrote a book called The Horseman's Word about growing up in rural Norfolk. Published in 2011. Good for Granta to spot that gem forming 20 years ahead of publication.
Christopher Petit's Robinson is an extract from an upcoming book. Benefit of 2020 hindsight says the book wasn't that memorable.
Louise Erdrich has a native American story of death and resurrection over-using magic realism as a technique. Hard to buy into that in a short story.
November 18, 2021
A really, really unique "magazine"? "Book"?
Consists of short stories written by a few authors as well as a collection of photos of dead people (a dead child as well). Nothing gory.
One story is an old legend which I found very interesting.
If you are sensitive to the topic of death I suggest you pass on this.
Consists of short stories written by a few authors as well as a collection of photos of dead people (a dead child as well). Nothing gory.
One story is an old legend which I found very interesting.
If you are sensitive to the topic of death I suggest you pass on this.
November 23, 2025
Where do we go from here, you're gone, i am no longer myself. When you die, i die as well
February 17, 2011
I really expected more from this book. I don't as a rule read books about death, but when I do, I want to gain some insight into living with the various ways people die. Several of the pieces in this book barely referred to it at all, and others were all over the boards but spoke very little to me. Don't bother digging this up at your local used bookstore- it was rotten. (Not even apologetic for that...)
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews