Granta 28: Birthday Special!

Granta: The Magazine of New Writing #28

by Bill Buford (Editor)

This edition of Granta includes articles by James Fenton, Milan Kundera, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Nadine Gordimer, Russell Hoban, Adam Mars Jones, Redmond O'Hanlon, Salman Rushdie and others.

Genres: Essays, Fiction, Short Stories, Anthologies

252 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1989

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

[GoldGato · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a while, I was a fan of the Granta collections, which mixed fiction with photojournalism, history, memoirs, and non-fiction. It was hard to get bored with any edition, as there was something for everyone. Eventually, I moved on to other obsessions (ice cream, Bryan Ferry recordings, ice cream) but some of the old Granta publications still hold forth in my personal library.

As the title states, this particular volume is the birthday special when Granta turned ten (1989). There are some big time writers in this one, including the following:

Salman Rushdie
His poem is about the protests against his Satanic Verses book.
To sing on, in spite of attacks,
to sing (while my dreams are being murdered by facts)
praises of butterflies broken on racks.

Nadine Gordimer
The Ultimate Safari relates how a young girl views the loss of her parents and homeland as war makes her a refugee.

Richard Rayner
A Discourse On The Elephant is not what you think and at first I wasn't interested. But it got me by the end.

There are also works from Russell Hoban, John Updike, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others. But the best section is the beginning with Tiananmen Square by John Simpson, a breathtaking account of what actually happened when the young Chinese students were obliterated by China's government. If the rest of this book was as spellbinding, it would rank as one of Granta's best, but the rest was fairly average.

Book Season = Winter (Internationale)

[Andy Todd · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is always hard to give a rating to an edition of Granta. It is a magazine; there will be some articles and stories that work well and others that don't press your buttons. Besides, these pieces are not meant to be lived with but tasted, savoured and then put down.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently came across Granta 28 from 1989 and decided to read it, because it has pieces from several writers I admired (Salman Rusdie, Nadine Gordimer, Leonard Michaels, Jay McInerney, John Updike, and Mario Vargas Llosa) as well as pieces from writers I have been aware of but haven't read (such as Guy Davenport, William Boyd, Jeanette Winterson, Joy Williams, and Colin Thurbron). There were also a couple of photography collections: Marketa Luskacova's "Pilgrims in Ireland" and Eugene Richards' "Americans." Most pieces were of interest to me and some of the standouts included: John Simpson's tense non fiction piece ""Tiananmen Square, "Gordiner's "The Ultimate Safari," Boyd's "Transfigured Night," Russel Hoban's inventive meta-fiction "The Man with the Daggar," and "Jimmy" by McInerney. It is a good collection of interesting short pieces.