Granta 21: The Story-Teller

Granta: The Magazine of New Writing #21

by Bill Buford (Editor)

The Story Teller ( The Magazine of New Writing)

Genres: Essays

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

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

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read several of these Granta collections now and I always love them. Such a good assembly of stuff. My highlights from this one: Primo Levi's piece on weightlessness; Isabel Allende's magic and saucy story; Ryszard Kapuscinkski being a badass journalist and storyteller; and straight-talking Richard Ford.

I probably should have liked Bruce Chatwin's stuff more than I did. The content was amazing and interesting (aboriginal story telling and its links to the land, its creation of the land) but I found him kind of icky as a person I think.

It was a strange experience reading Raymond Carver's 'Menundo'. I must have read it ages ago and forgotten about it. Anxious deja vu reading. Settling into the skin of the man who missed the Menundo. I also feel like I miss(ed) the Menundo.

And Jonathan Schnell validated loads of my life with his piece 'Paradise'! Good Nietzschean chat about constant evolution morality and creativity:

'the best path of resistance [is] not a better set of precepts for people to cling to but a mental process - be it 'thought' or 'poetry'; not the mind holding fast to received knowledge but the mind in motion: the mind awake, stirred, responding, discriminating, open, alive.'

(Nietzsche says it better but hey, it's a hard and contradictory thing to try to say)

[Derek Baldwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The piece by Richard Ford is good, and the Raymond Carver short story, unsurprisingly, is marvellous. An interesting interview of Bruce Chatwin is succeeded by a lengthy portmanteau of extracts from The Songlines. That is excellent. The rest: meh.