Granta 133

Granta 133
Author: Sigrid Rausing
Publisher: Granta
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2015-11-19
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1905881924

In this issue, acclaimed nature writer Barry Lopez meditates on language and seeing; Australian writer Rebecca Giggs witnesses the monumental death of a stranded whale; science writer Fred Pearce describes the Herculean effort to keep nuclear Sellafield safe; Kathleen Jamie travels to the Alaskan wilderness; and Adam Nicolson investigates murder in rural Romania, with photographs by Gus Palmer. Plus: unpublished extracts from the notebooks of Roger Deakin, introduced by Robert Macfarlane. Fiction by Ann Beattie, Ben Marcus, David Szalay and Deb Olin Unferth. Poetry by Noelle Kocot, Maureen N. McLane, Ange Mlinko and Andrew Motion. Photography by Helge Skodvin with an introduction by Audrey Niffenegger. Cover art Stanley Donwood, Hurt Hill, 2013

The Wild Places

The Wild Places
Author: Robert Macfarlane
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2008-06-24
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1440638659

From the author of The Old Ways and Underland, an "eloquent (and compulsively readable) reminder that, though we're laying waste the world, nature still holds sway over much of the earth's surface." --Bill McKibben Winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and a finalist for the Orion Book Award Are there any genuinely wild places left in Britain and Ireland? That is the question that Robert Macfarlane poses to himself as he embarks on a series of breathtaking journeys through some of the archipelago's most remarkable landscapes. He climbs, walks, and swims by day and spends his nights sleeping on cliff-tops and in ancient meadows and wildwoods. With elegance and passion he entwines history, memory, and landscape in a bewitching evocation of wildness and its vital importance.

The White Book

The White Book
Author: Han Kang
Publisher: Hogarth
Total Pages: 92
Release: 2019-02-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525573089

FROM HAN KANG, WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE “[Han Kang writes in] intense poetic prose that . . . exposes the fragility of human life.”—from the Nobel Prize citation SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • A “formally daring, emotionally devastating, and deeply political” (The New York Times Book Review) exploration of personal grief through the prism of the color white, from the internationally bestselling author of The Vegetarian “Stunningly beautiful writing . . . delicate and gorgeous . . . one of the smartest reflections on what it means to remember those we’ve lost.”—NPR While on a writer’s residency, a nameless narrator focuses on the color white to creatively channel her inner pain. Through lyrical, interconnected stories, she grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, attempting to make sense of her older sister’s death using the color white. From trying to imagine her mother’s first time producing breast milk to watching the snow fall and meditating on the impermanence of life, she weaves a poignant, heartfelt story of the omnipresence of grief and the ways we perceive the world around us. In captivating, starkly beautiful language, The White Book offers a multilayered exploration of color and its absence, of the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and of our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.

New American Stories

New American Stories
Author: Ben Marcus
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 778
Release: 2015-07-21
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0804173540

In New American Stories, the beautiful, the strange, the melancholy, and the sublime all comingle to show the vast range of the American short story . In this remarkable anthology, Ben Marcus has corralled a vital and artistically singular crowd of contemporary fiction writers. Collected here are practitioners of deep realism, mind-blowing experimentalism, and every hybrid in between. Luminaries and cult authors stand side by side with the most compelling new literary voices. Nothing less than the American short story renaissance distilled down to its most relevant, daring, and unforgettable works, New American Stories puts on wide display the true art of an American idiom.

My Life in Orange

My Life in Orange
Author: Tim Guest
Publisher: HMH
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2016-03-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0544151615

A memoir of formative years spent on a series of communes: A “wonderful account of a frankly ghastly childhood . . . Hilarious and heartbreaking” (Daily Mail). At the age of six, Tim Guest was taken by his mother to a commune modeled on the teachings of the notorious Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. The Bhagwan preached an eclectic doctrine of Eastern mysticism, chaotic therapy, and sexual freedom, and enjoyed inhaling laughing gas, preaching from a dentist's chair, and collecting Rolls Royces. Tim and his mother were given Sanskrit names, dressed entirely in orange, and encouraged to surrender themselves into their new family. While his mother worked tirelessly for the cause, Tim—or Yogesh, as he was now called—lived a life of well-meaning but woefully misguided neglect in various communes in England, Oregon, India, and Germany. In 1985 the movement collapsed amid allegations of mass poisonings, attempted murder, and tax evasion, and Yogesh was once again Tim. In this extraordinary memoir, Tim Guest chronicles the heartbreaking experience of being left alone on earth while his mother hunted heaven. “An intelligent, wry, openhearted memoir of surviving a childhood and a cultural phenomenon that were both extraordinary.” —Booklist (starred review)

Comic Timing

Comic Timing
Author: Holly Pester
Publisher: Granta Books
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-02-04
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1783786876

Comic Timing, Holly Pester's extraordinary debut collection of poems, chronicles the experience of living and working as a radical and resistant act. These poems shunt a reader between the political and personal via unique, fragmentary and illusory turns of phrase. Holly tackles marginal bodies, landlords, bog butter, desire, domestic and civic spaces in an unique and illusory voice. She chronicles the prevailing mood of our times, mining radical and anarchic histories to offer a collection of political resistance with both absurdity and seriousness. These poems interrogate and poke fun at the expectations of people in a commodified culture with a wry humour. Combining a beautifully performed naivety with a profound intellect, this collection is a hugely original approach to a number of pressing issues. Worker's rights, feminisms, reproductive rights and marginalised bodies and their positions are all thought through in this startling and innovative voice.

The Age of Wire and String

The Age of Wire and String
Author: Ben Marcus
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 1998
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781564781963

"A rare, genius-struck achievement . . . filled with great beauties, high themes, enormous sorrows." Kirkus Reviews