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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
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Mess
Romesh Gunesekera
‘You have to go on the offensive until you smell victory. Then you have the aphrodisiac and can go full tilt.’
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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.’
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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.
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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.’
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A Sparrow Fallen
Dave Heath
‘a sparrow fallen; / blackness of pain shimmering / hard in soft white light’
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Revelations
Ange Mlinko
‘I think of this when raising my eyes / to a filigreed cross in a sanctuary‘’
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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
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The Mountain
Christopher DeWeese
‘When the oxygen thins, / the world gets less reciprocal.’
|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.’
