Granta 168
This is the first issue of Granta I've read since the horror issue (#117, back in 2011). A friend told me that Han Kang had a story in the New Yorker and I remembered how much I used to enjoy reading that magazine and The Atlantic. They're tough to get for a reasonable price in the UK, though, and so I started looking for similar magazines published locally. I went through a few periodicals that I didn't really love before I remembered that Granta exists, and here we are.
This was an interesting issue. There wasn't much that I'd say I loved or that massively stood out to me in it, but I reached the end with the sense that I'd enjoyed reading it a lot. I've mentioned J.M. Coetzee's "The Museum Guest" in another post this month as being a story that I enjoyed, and I also liked Sophie Collins' "Private View" despite feeling that it ended very abruptly, in a way that I didn't fully understand.
On the non-fiction side of things I liked Mary Gaitskill's "The Pneumaa Illusion" enough that I'm going to look up the rest of her work. I'm particularly interested in the piece she wrote about her lost cat, which appears in issue 107. I also got a lot out of Christian Lorentzen's "Literature Without Literature", which is concerned with the stories we tell ourselves about the nature of literature and how they're impacted by commercial, capitalistic concerns.
I primarily pick up magazines like this for the fiction, but this year has seen me become much more interested in autofiction and what TOLKA calls "formally promiscuous non-fiction", and it's nice to see that Granta publishes plenty of that as well. I've picked up an annual subscription off the back of this issue, partly because I'm really interested in the China issue (139) and there's a lot of additional fiction in that issue published in the online edition that's behind the subscription paywall, but also simply because it will be nice to have a subscription to something again. I wish I could afford for that to be McSweeney's, frankly, but I enjoyed this issue of Granta and I'm looking forward to seeing what the next four issues hold.