Granta 100: The Magazine of New Writing

Another fantastic volume! This one (#100) is a mixture of genre's. It's a full taste of the spectrum! Lots of great writers ~ as always! Highly recommend!

I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this edition, with the notably exception of the mystifyingly dull James Fenton piece about buying a clavichord which is neither interesting nor particularly well written. True the photo essay by Bruce Frankel on turn of the century US does not fare well in the reproduction and is one of the duller collection of images I have seen in this aspect of Granta and, for me at least Helen Oyeyemi's closing extract from Pie-Kah does not suit the short format well in the way that some extracts don't. But as for the rest, I was completely engrossed in each piece. There's a very impressive collection of writers here - with many of the most influential names of recent years, particularly in British literature (Pinter, Rushdie, McEwan, Barnes, Amis to name just a few). There's more poetry than normal in Granta and Pinter's poem brings a lump to your throat reading it now that he is no longer with us. It's a longer collection than normal too - as befits a centenary edition - so it's hard to know where to start. It's particularly strong on fiction - I loved Jayne Anne Phillips' extract from Lark and Termite (Vintage Contemporaries), Helen Simpson's story of a death on a plane, Ingo Schulze's strange piece on Estonia, Julian Barnes beautiful Scottish story and AM Holmes' twisted May We Be Forgiven. On the subject of twisted, Martin Amis presents a funny, though as he belatedly acknowledges, perhaps slightly bad taste satire of Islamic fundamentalism. Of the non-fiction, the stand out pieces are Salman Rushdie in less knowingly intellectual form than his non-fiction work can frequently appear, Isabel Hilton's beautiful piece on Greenland and Lucy Eyre's intelligent anthropological questioning of the impact of tourism on native people. And that's without mentioning Nicholas Shakespeare's ex-pat Bombay story, Doris Lessing's memoir, Mario Vargas Llosa's terrific character sketches, Hanif Kureishi's Anglo-Pakistani tale, and Adam Hollinghurst's Roman holiday story. I thought it was a terrific collection.

What a fantastic way to experience new writing! William Boyd is one of my favourite authors, and to read a collection that has been edited by him is great. Some of the authors were not to my liking, but then this is the advantage of reading a compilation..you can skip the excerpts that don't engage you and read on. This purchase was one of my better ones and as a result of reading this, I went to my local book store and bought several back issues. In fact, this book is so good that I have bought myself a subscription.