Review of Granta 169: China, edited by Thomas Meaney (Granta Trust, 2024)
The London-based literary quarterly Granta was founded by a group of Cambridge University postgraduates in 1979. It was born out of the shards of an old student magazine, the Granta, which was important in its own way for publishing the juvenilia of writers like Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. By the late twentieth century, the publication had changed in both form and scope. If Granta had insular origins — a student magazine at Cambridge — it now flung itself open to the world. Its first issue was on new American writing, featuring fiction, interviews, essays, and memoir, and including Susan Sontag, Donald Barthelme, William Gass, and Joyce Carol Oates among its authors.
Already from its earliest issues, you could get an impression of a sensibility. Granta had an intellectual air and yet wore it casually. It was more experimental than the mainstream literary magazines across the Atlantic and more curious about the world than the New Yorker, Harper’s, or Paris Review, publications whose attention continues to be largely focused on the United States and Europe. In contrast, Granta’s vantage was less fixed: at once postwar British and dispersed, or postwar British through being dispersed. It approached the world with a lightness lent it by a slight distance from Great Power politicking, offering a view not from Washington or New York but not from London, exactly, either.
In the 1980s, Granta embarked on a great globalization‒era adventure in travel writing. In doing so, it helped lift a supposedly trivial form into a canonized, even innovative strain of literature — travel writing that at its best suggested new ground for…
Auteur: William Harris
