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← Back to all issuesGranta 125: After the War
Autumn 2013
How long is the shadow of a battle, an explosion, a revolution? What stories arise in the wake of devastation? This issue explores the complicated aftermath and legacy of conflict. Lindsey Hilsum returns to Rwanda two decades after witnessing the beginning of genocide. Patrick French writes of a great-uncle whose heroism in World War I left behind a ‘saturating cult of remembrance’. From air-raid drills in Paul Auster’s America to a calf with a broken foot in Herta Müller’s Rumania, this is how we live after the war.
From this Issue
Essays & Memoir|Granta 125
Essays & Memoir|Granta 125
The Rainy Season
Lindsey Hilsum
‘In Rwanda today so much is unspoken or only whispered.’
Essays & Memoir|Granta 125
Essays & Memoir|Granta 125
Mess
Romesh Gunesekera
‘You have to go on the offensive until you smell victory. Then you have the aphrodisiac and can go full tilt.’
Poetry|Granta 125
Fiction|Granta 125
Fiction|Granta 125
Crow Fair
Thomas McGuane
‘You’re in a different world when your own mother doesn’t recognize you, or thinks you’re the stranger who gave her a hickey.’
Fiction|Granta 125
Art & Photography|Granta 125
Art & Photography|Granta 125
Zone of Absolute Discomfort
Justin Jin
The icy hinterland is wretched to live in, but just hospitable enough to allow for the extraction of billions of tons of resources trapped beneath the ground.
Fiction|Granta 125
Fiction|Granta 125
Always the Same Snow and Always the Same Uncle
Herta Müller
‘Who knows: what I write I must eat, what I don’t write – eats me.’
Art & Photography|Granta 125
Art & Photography|Granta 125
A Sparrow Fallen
Dave Heath
‘a sparrow fallen; / blackness of pain shimmering / hard in soft white light’
Essays & Memoir|Granta 125
Essays & Memoir|Granta 125
You Remember the Planes
Paul Auster
‘You can’t remember the precise moment when you understood that you were a Jew.’
Fiction|Granta 125
Fiction|Granta 125
From Dream to Dream
Yiyun Li
‘At what point had one’s life stopped belonging to one?’
Essays & Memoir|Granta 125
Essays & Memoir|Granta 125
Stalkers
Hari Kunzru
‘Writer: How do we get back? Stalker: Here, nobody returns.’
Poetry|Granta 125
Poetry|Granta 125
Revelations
Ange Mlinko
‘I think of this when raising my eyes / to a filigreed cross in a sanctuary‘’
Fiction|Granta 125
Fiction|Granta 125
After the War
Patrick French
‘My antipathy to military culture started early and it wasn't helped by living in a garrison town.’
The Online Edition
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
Dogfight Over Karachi
Khademul Islam
‘I slowly went down the stairs, feeling my being unspooling.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
The Mountain
Christopher DeWeese
‘When the oxygen thins, / the world gets less reciprocal.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
Observations on the Ground
Mary Ruefle
‘Those flowers belong to the dead.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
First Sentence: Patrick French
Patrick French
‘In Edwardian days, if you were growing up in England (though Maurice was from Ireland) your life was regimented.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
First Sentence: A.L. Kennedy
A.L. Kennedy
‘I have never seen anyone eat figs in the street and feel I am unsurprised.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
After Silk Road
Mike Power
‘In a haze of intense tropical satisfaction I flip-flopped down a dirt track between the adobe huts. I heard singing women calming fractious babies, and then I met the island’s chief albino shaman, Mandiuliguina Flores.’
Poetry|The Online Edition
from Opening Invocation
Jean-Paul de Dadelsen
Translator’s Note ‘Opening Invocation’ grew from a short text in prose written and broadcast...
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
1979
Aminatta Forna
‘What happened in 1979 has happened many times before and many times since, in places where people have set themselves free and believed with all their hearts that the freedom they had fought for was real and lasting, only to be recaptured.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
First Sentence: Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li
‘But for her, and perhaps for many, the solidity of an invented life is not trustworthy.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
First Sentence: Ange Mlinko
Ange Mlinko
‘I rediscovered the efficacy of meter (or the ‘contrast between fixity and flux’) when I was stuck in a shark tunnel with my kids and was afraid I was coming down with a panic attack.’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
A Dynasty of Album Cover Art
Lemi Ghariokwu
‘The music is as powerful as it gets and beneath his knife-edge, cutting sarcasm, Fela’s voice rages’
Essays & Memoir|The Online Edition
A Brief History of a Musical Failure
Catherine Tice
‘At the end of the piece, there was silence, followed by a sudden thunder of feet and bows on the stands. A thrilling noise.’
Podcasts|The Online Edition
Eleanor Catton: The Granta Podcast, Ep. 83
Eleanor Catton & Anne Meadows
Anne Meadows talks to Eleanor Catton about opium and gold, whether a good author can also be a sadist and what it means to be a New Zealand writer today.