Granta 111: Going Back

by John Freeman

Overview

Richard Russo returns home to a hometown on the verge of extinction. Up-and-coming fiction writer Claire Vaye Watkins explores a damaged car on an abandoned road and a Ziploc bag of pristine letters. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shows what happens when a married man’s old flame threatens to return to Lagos. A young Iris Murdoch writes devotional letters to the older French Surrealist and Oulipo co-founder Raymond Queneau. Hal Crowther delivers a blistering critique of the Internet’s erosion of solitude.

With extracts from Mark Twain’s never-before published memoir on childhood and Colin Grant’s highly anticipated memoir Bageye at the Wheel; new poetry from Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, and Nicholas Christopher; and a photographic essay by Ian Teh.

Further works include Elizabeth McCracken's stirring tale of a young widower and the traces we leave behind; Leila Aboulela’s story of an aspiring Sudanese academic’s return to London with his young Muslim wife; foreign correspondent Janine Di Giovanni’s return to Sarajevo to search for a boy she knew fifteen years ago; Peter Orner’s examination of the question ‘When does a place become something else?’ in Chappaquiddick; and Joseph O’Neill on the breaking of America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781905881192
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	07/26/2010
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	8.54(w) x 11.08(h) x 0.68(d)

About the Author

John Freeman has been editor of Granta since 2009. He is the author of The Tyranny of E-Mail and former president of the National Book Critics Circle. His criticism has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian and the Independent.