Ian Jack is a Scottish journalist renowned for his long tenure as the editor of the literary magazine Granta, a position he held from 1995 to 2007. His editorial work shaped the landscape of contemporary literature during his influential years at the publication.
God's Own Countries
The politics of religion around the world, featuring John McGahern, A. L. Kennedy, Richard Mabey, Simon Gray, Geoff Dyer, Jackie Kay, Pankaj Mishra, Nell Freudenberger, and more on their personal experiences—close, baffling, acrimonious, or nonexistent— of the divine.
Where Travel Writing Went Next
Features articles by: Tim Parks, on the joys of commuting from Verona to Milan every day; Christopher de Bellaigue, on tracking down the Armenians in Turkey; Jeremy Treglown, following in the footsteps of V. S. Pritchett in Spain; Jeremy Seabrook, on being separated from his twin; and, Todd McEwen, on Cary Grant's trousers.
Looks at the nature of love: it can be hard to love the people we should love; sometimes objects of affection are easier. This issue includes an account of a boyhood spent caring for a father with Parkinson's Disease ('Who are you?'), Jeremy Seabrook on the twin brother he hardly knew, and Sean Wilsey on his devotion to bicycles.
The author of the celebrated and widely-acclaimed The Smoking Diaries, returns to print, with a tender, affecting, and of course funny account of his friendship with Alan Bates, written as he waits in Barbados for Harold Pinter to turn up.
Dispatches from What's Left of It
Country Life: how it is lived, how it has changed, and how the changes are far from over. An issue that ranges from English fox-hunters to the rice-planters of the Ganges delta. Featuring Tim Adams goes on a fox hunt, Craig Taylor returns to Akenfield thirty-five years after Ronald Blythe's landmark book, and Jeff Sharlet finds out what's eating rural Coloradans. Plus Margaret Atwood, James Hamilton-Paterson, Barry Lopez, Orhan Pamuk and Tim Winton on the weather.
Collection & anthologies of various literacy from John MCGahern on his mother's struggle for health & happiness in Catholic Ireland, Alexander Fuller on bearing a child in Africa, Ryszard Kapuscinski on his memories of the Second World War plus writings from Edmund White, Paul Theroux, Jim Lewis and others.
Everybody has been a reluctant or willing member of one: the family, the school, the football side, the quiz team. Group photographs are their souvenir. In this issue of Granta, writers take out their group photographs and evoke the times, places and people they used to know.
This edition centres around celebrity, both good and bad. Contributions include: the search for Hitler's doctor; an Irish republican looks at the Queen Kyle Stone; how Hillary Clinton's home views Hillary; and the cannibal emperor of the Central African Republic.
In this issue, writers from across the world describe how America has affected them - culturally, politically, economically, as citizens, as writers, as children and as adults, for better or worse.
Is Australia a remote chunk of the northern, western world or a part of Asia? Is it a new version of the USA with European manners ("the new California"), or a second-hand version of Europe with American ones? How does it accommodate the fate of its original human inhabitants, or propose a decent future for them? Why is its head of state still the British queen? In Australia, two universal, modern problems are vividly posed. Who are we? What shall we become?
