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- Contents Category: Journals
- Custom Article Title: Luke Horton reviews 'Granta 129: Fate' edited by Sigrid Rausing
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In 2013, publisher Sigrid Rausing significantly reduced Granta magazine’s staff, and long-time editor John Freeman resigned. At this news, various high-profile contributors, including Peter Carey, expressed their concern for the future of the magazine. But if we can judge solely on the quality of this edition, the new Rausing-edited Granta has lost none of its verve. It remains chock-full of fine writing and art.
With fate as its theme, much of the work in this edition speaks to love, loss, and mortality. Which is not to say that it makes for grim reading. The lead story, Louise Erdrich’s ‘Domain’, may be dark in subject matter, but it is also playful. A take on a no doubt popular science fiction theme, ‘Domain’ presents a future world in which the quality of your digitally uploaded afterlife is determined by which of the various corporate-owned simulations you can afford. It is literary in tone without sacrificing the pay-off of genre.
- Book 1 Title: Granta 129: Fate
- Book 1 Biblio: Granta $24.99 pb, 280 pp
Elsewhere, there is Will Self’s affecting tribute to his friend and literary hero J.G. Ballard, and an accompanying story, ‘Key Stroke’, in which Self imagines, with characteristic linguistic brio, Ballard’s final days; an excerpt from Miranda July’s forthcoming novel that, despite mining familiar territory (workplace cringe comedy), is genuinely funny; and a wonderfully evocative fable from Cynthia Ozick, ‘A Hebrew Sibyl’, which situates her great subject, Jewish otherness, in ancient Greece.
And there is Tim Winton’s ‘In the Shadow of the Hospital’; a meditation on his fear of hospitals and the way they have haunted him throughout his life. He married a nurse, and then lived for many years under the shadow of a Fremantle hospital, which gave him many stories to draw on in this memoir. Like many contributions to this edition, it has gravitas as well as wry humour.
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