Granta 22: With Your Tongue Down My Throat

Granta: The Magazine of New Writing #22

by Bill Buford (Editor), Jonathan Levi, Chris Hyde

Book by Hanif Kureishi Doris Lessing Nadine Gordimer Carlo

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Travel, Essays

256 pages, Paperback

First published September 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

[Derek Baldwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly very good, only the last three or four pieces are not especially worth reading. The Hanif Kureishi novella is very entertaining and the piece set in Uganda is horribly disturbing. I would probably have found the piece by Leslie Cockburn shocking too if I hadn’t read the much fuller account of the Cocaine Importing Agency in whiteout.

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

Hanif Kureishi's first novella about down and dirty 1980's London and Adam Mars-Jones' up close and personal portrait of a man recording his daily life while in remission from Aids are the highlights of a strong issue which also includes Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, and Carlos Fuentes.

[Vazz · Rating 5 out of 5]

wonderful novella, I'm actually rereading it for the 2nd time. Being South Asian British and punk, this story greatly appeals to me. Both Nina (the punk chick) and Nadia (the Pakistani homely girl) remind me.. of myself. This was published in 1987/88, so the novella actually evokes very strong images of gritty London, the Punk London of the 1980s that doesn't exist anymore.

[Ami · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Kureishi story (title story) "with your tongue down my throat" changed my life completely.