Granta 46: Crime

Granta: The Magazine of New Writing #46

by Bill Buford (Editor)

This Granta collection includes James Ellroy's "Dick Contino's Blues", as well as stories by Paul Auster, Allan Gurganus, Tibor Fischer, Italo Calvino, Patricia Highsmith, Richard Rayner and Peragrine Hodson, a comparison of 1969 and 1989, the war in Liberia and civil wars around the world.

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthologies

256 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1994

About the author

William 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".

Reviews

[Katsumi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This edition of Granta focusing on 'Crime' takes a unique approach, incorporating contemporary examples of short "crime fiction" with two real-life accounts of murders committed in Glasgow, as told by the murderers themselves. It seems this structure encourages reflexion on our personal reactions to the nature of crime and the extent to which our perception of what is real and what is fiction will color our tolerance of graphic descriptions. While we see violence depicted in film and in fiction constantly, to an extent that many of us feel largely desensitized to its "shock" effects, it is interesting to read these real-life autobiographical accounts embedded in the series of "crime fiction" pieces. Personally, I found myself shocked and horrified as I listened to the real-life murderers tell their all too graphic stories, while I breezed through the less threatening fictional descriptions of similar events. I think the experience which comes by reading these two types of stories, juxtaposed, is what makes GRANTA 46: CRIME worthwhile.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 2 out of 5]

A mix of fiction, non-fiction and photography all on the theme of crime. Pieces by James Ellroy, Hugh Collins, Henry John Reid, Hugh Barnes, Andrew Savulivh, Tim Willocks, Allan Gurganus, Perregrine Hodson, Paul Auster, Tibor Fischer and Italo Calvino.

[Paul Campagna]

LOVED the story "The Penitentiary" by Tim Willocks. Didn't really like the story "Local Man Pleads Guilty to Sex with Corpse" by Allan Gurganus