Search results for ""granta publications ltd""

Included in the BEST OF GRANTA series: the Costa-award winning memoir on what it means to grow old.

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From the award-winning author of Weasels in the Attic, a modern fable about the world of work Beyond the town, there is the factory. Beyond the factory, there is nothing. Within the sprawling industrial complex, three new employees are each assigned a department. There, each must focuses on a specific task: one shreds paper, one proofreads documents, and another studies the moss growing all over the expansive grounds. As they grow accustomed to the routine and co-workers, their lives become governed by their work--days take on a strange logic and momentum, and little by little, the margins of reality seem to be dissolving: Where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin? What's going on with the strange animals here? And after a while--it could be weeks or years--the three workers struggle to answer the most basic question: What am I doing here? With hints of Kafka and Beckett and unexpected moments of creeping humour, The Factory is a vivid, and sometimes surreal, portrait of the absurdity and meaninglessness of the modern workplace.

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A powerful, compressed masterwork that explores questions of complicity, power and devotion - from one of Granta magazine's Best of Young British Novelists 2023

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INCLUDED IN THE BEST OF GRANTA SERIES: an epic novel about the far-reaching effects of China's revolutionary history, told through the stories of two interlinked musical families, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize

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Nisha Ramayya's second collection situates listening as a political act; a way of attuning to the world around us, paying attention, and understanding our interconnectedness

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The magical sequel to Scattered All Over the Earth, from the prize-winning Japanese author.

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'A luminous study' Luke Harding, Guardian 'Courageous and shocking' Katy Guest, Books of the Year, Independent on Sunday How did a small-minded, low-level KGB operative come to control the world's largest country and, in an astonishingly short time, destroy years of progress, making Russia once more a threat to her own people and to the world? Masha Gessen shows that when Vladimir Putin, an unimportant, low-level KGB operative, was rushed to power by a group of Oligarchs in 1999, he was a man without a history. Yet within a few brief years, he had dismantled Russia's media, wrested control and wealth from the country's burgeoning business class, and decimated the fragile mechanisms of democracy. Virtually every opposing voice was silenced, with political rivals and critics driven into exile or to the grave. Drawing on information and sources no other writer has tapped, Masha Gessen's fearless account charts Putin's rise from the boy who had scrapped his way through post-war Leningrad schoolyards. Now the 'faceless' man who manoeuvred his way into absolute - and absolutely corrupt - power, has become a threat to the stability of the world, and this important book is more relevant than ever. Now with a new preface by the author. 'A clear, brave book... Gessen offers intriguing details of the scratching, biting, hair-tearing, undersized, brawling boy Putin, refusing to be bullied in the grubby back yards of Leningrad' James Meek, Observer 'Gessen's engaging prose combines a native's passion with a mordant wit and caustic understatement that are characteristically Russian' AD Miller, Daily Telegraph

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A HAUNTING COLLECTION OF STORIES THAT WEAVES HAWAIIAN MYTHOLOGY WITH A RICH SENSE OF PLACE This wrenching and sensational debut story collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a contemporary landscape thick with inherited wisdom and the ghosts of colonisation. This is a Hawai'i where unruly sexuality and generational memory overflow the postcard image of paradise and the boundaries of the real, where the superstitions born of the islands take on the weight of truth. A childhood encounter with a wild pua'a (pig) on the haunted Pali highway portends one young woman's fraught relationship with her pregnant body. An elderly widow begins seeing her deceased lover in a giant flower. A kanaka writer, mid-manuscript, feels her raw pages quaking and knocking in the briefcase. Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare is both a fierce love letter to Hawaiian identity and mythology, and a searing dispatch from an occupied territory threatening to erupt with violent secrets.

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Included in the BEST OF GRANTA series: deWitt's dazzlingly original novel is a darkly funny, offbeat western about a reluctant assassin and his murderous brother, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

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This issue of "Granta" was inspired by the original campaign for the Best Young British Novelists. This book includes the writing from the 20 writers judged in 1983.

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A speculative-poetic work from the Forward Prize-winning, T.S. Eliot shortlisted author of RENDANG. At the heart of Brother Poem is a sequence addressed to a fictional brother. Through these fragments, Will Harris attempts to reckon with the past while mourning what never existed. The text moves, cloud-like, through states of consciousness, beings and geographies, to create a moving portrait of contemporary anxieties around language and the need to communicate. With pronominal shifts, broken dialogisms, and obsessive feedback loops, it reflects on the fictions we tell ourselves, and in our attempts to live up to the demands of others. From a dimension uncannily like our own, intuited through signs, whispers, and glitches, Brother Poem is shadowed by the loss of what can't be seen. Telling stories of bizarre familial reckonings and difficult relationships, about love and living with others, it is a deeply sensitive coming-of-age poetics.

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The three protagonists in this memoir are dead: a mother, a father, and a sister. A bookish and artistic family living in a beautiful old house in a pleasant part of Toronto. Two girls growing up in the 60s and 70s. All seems well until one of them begins to manifest signs of distress, leading, eventually, to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. In this triptych of beautifully written memoir-essays, Canadian author Martha Baillie reflects on the complex entangled lives of her mother, father and sister. There Is No Blue is both a close observation of a family's experience of a diagnosis of mental illness, and a layered story of grief.

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WINNER OF THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION A spectacular, definitive portrait of ordinary life within one of the world's most repressive states - North Korea. 'A most perceptive and eye-opening account of everyday life in North Korea' Jung Chang North Korea is Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four made reality: it is the only country in the world not connected to the internet; where Gone with the Wind is a dangerous, banned book; and where during political rallies, spies study your expression to check your sincerity. Nothing to Envy weaves together the stories of adversity and resilience of six residents of Chongin, North Korea's third-largest city. From extensive interviews and with tenacious investigative work, Barbara Demick has recreated the concerns, culture and lifestyles of North Korean citizens in a gripping narrative, and vividly reconstructed the inner workings of this extraordinary and secretive country. Includes an updated afterword by the author. 'Impossible to put down ... helps restore humanity to some of the world's most oppressed people' Observer

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WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 'Reads like a brilliant miniseries ... has the narrative intensity of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and the emotional punch of Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved.' Observer Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his taller, smarter, and more successful younger brother George acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in New York City. But Harry also knows his brother has a murderous temper. When George loses control the result is an act of violence so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives in which they both must seek absolution. Suddenly Harry finds himself playing parent to his brother's two adolescent children, tumbling down a rabbit hole of online sex, and dealing with aging parents who move through life like travellers on a fantastic voyage. And he is forced to confront the ways in which our histories can either compel us to repeat our mistakes - or become the catalyst for change. May We Be Forgiven is a darkly funny tale exploring how one deeply fractured family might begin to put itself back together. 'An unflinching account of a catastrophic, violent, black-comic, transformative year in the history of one broken American family. Flat-out amazing' Salman Rushdie

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Photographer and African art collector Michel de Combes travelled extensively in West Africa over a period of fifteen years from the late 1980s, researching and documenting Bolon masks. He journeyed alone, staying in remote villages for up to five months of the year, capturing the masks and mask-making on film. His drive to understand the magic of the mask has resulted in this unique project; an unsurpassed collection of photographs of masks from one of the most remote areas of Africa. Together, the book and DVD present images never before published, giving a remarkable insight into a secret world of ritual performance.

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This issue features new work by the twenty writers that Granta's judges - including novelists Edmund White and A.M. Homes - have selected as the most interesting new young voices in American fiction. Granta began its influential "Best of Young..." series with British novelists in 1983, repeated in 1993 and 2003. In 1996, Granta's first "Best of Young American Novelists" included Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen and Lorrie Moore. Who will match them in the new generation?

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A stunning collection of stories that weaves Hawaiian mythology with a vivid fabulism and rich sense of place - for fans of Mariana Enriquez and Carmen Maria Machado

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INCLUDED IN THE BEST OF GRANTA SERIES: a powerful and chilling novel of haunted landscapes, rites of the past and a teenage girl in danger

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WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 'A breathtakingly ambitious mystery ... as beautiful as it is triumphant.' Daily Mail An astonishing, epic story of promise, deceit and desperation in New Zealand's gold rush. 'What brings a fellow down here, you know, to the ends of the earth - what sparks a man?' It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky. The Luminaries is an extraordinary piece of fiction, both a ghost story and a gripping mystery. Set amidst the promise, deceit and desperation of the mid-19th century goldrush, the lives of its rich, complex cast unspool through a labyrinthine, celestial pattern. Fiendishly clever, vividly rendered and made into a major BBC TV series, The Luminaries established Catton as one of the brightest stars in the firmament. 'A book to curl up with and devour, intricately plotted and extravagantly described, a pastiche of the Victorian sensation novel in the same smart yet playful vein as Sarah Waters.' Guardian

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A landmark, incendiary collection from one of the leading essayists working today. Inspiring everyone from radical activists to Beyoncé Knowles, Rebecca Solnit's essay 'Men Explain Things to Me' has become a touchstone of the feminist movement and established her as one of the leading thinkers of our time. Here it is collected along with the best of Solnit's feminist writings. From French sex scandals to the nuclear family, rape culture to mansplaining, Virginia Woolf to colonialism, these essays are a fierce and incisive exploration of the issues that a patriarchal culture will not necessarily acknowledge as 'issues' at all. With grace, wit and energy, and in the most exquisite and inviting of prose, Rebecca Solnit proves herself a vital leading figure of the feminist movement and a radical, humane thinker. 'Solnit is a compelling writer with a glorious turn of phrase' Evening Standard

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Over 400 million people around the world have been diagnosed with diabetes. Before the discovery of insulin, diabetes was treated through diet, from eating purely meat to the reliance on fats, and repeated fasting. After two centuries of conflicting medical advice, most authorities today believe that those with diabetes can have the same dietary freedom enjoyed by the rest of us, including the occasional ice-cream, leaving the job of controlling the disease to insulin therapy. However, this guiding principle has been accompanied by an explosive rise in diabetes over the last fifty years, and the expectation that sufferers' health will deteriorate steadily over time. In this ground-breaking book, award-winning science writer Gary Taubes explores the history of the treatment of diabetes, elucidating the way that badly conceived research influences the guidance that doctors offer today, at the expense of patients' long-term well-being. Passionately argued and deeply researched, Rethinking Diabetes reimagines diabetes care with diet at its centre, and is hugely persuasive in its questioning of the established wisdom that may have enabled the current epidemic of diabetes and obesity.

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'Powerful and brilliant ... Straw Dogs challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be human, and convincingly shows that most of them are delusions.' J. G. Ballard From Plato to Christianity, from the Enlightenment to Nietzsche, the Western tradition has been based on arrogant and erroneous beliefs about human beings and their place in the world. In his radical work of philosophy John Gray sets out to challenge our most cherished assumptions about what it means to be human. Philosophies such as liberalism and Marxism enthrone humankind as a species whose destiny is to transcend natural limits and conquer the Earth. Even in the present day, despite Darwin's discoveries, nearly all schools of thought take as their starting point the belief that humans are radically different from other animals. John Gray argues that this belief in human difference is a dangerous illusion and explores how the world and human life look once humanism has been finally abandoned. The result is an exhilarating, sometimes disturbing book that leads the reader to question our deepest-held beliefs.

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From the celebrated author of The Topeka School, a collection of poetry that is dazzlingly intelligent, moving and speaks directly to our complex times. The Lights is a constellation of verse and prose, voice memos and vignettes, songs and silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. These are poems at once alive to the forces that shape human society and to the rhythms of the natural world, to the power of new technologies and the wonder of our timeless planet. Sometimes the scale is intimate and quiet and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the "collectivization of feeling": "I want everybody out there to sing along, even the stones." Written over a span of fifteen years, The Lights records the pleasures, risks, and absurdities of making art and family and meaning against a backdrop of interlocking, accelerating crises. And, even while alert to the darkness, it is the light in the book that remains, in dusk, in images from space, in old poems, in power cuts, in the flickering connections between people. From one of the most celebrated writers of his generation, the poems in this collection come to us as beacons, illuminating new possibilities of thought and feeling.

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From the bestselling author of Strange Weather in Tokyo, a novel that moves between Japan past and present to tell a time-bending story about desire and destiny.

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Sister Perpetue is not to move. She is not to fall asleep. She is to sit, keeping guard over the patient's room. She has heard the stories of his hunger, which defy belief: that he has eaten all manner of creatures and objects. A child even, if the rumours are to be believed. But it is hard to believe that this slender, frail man is the one they once called The Great Tarare, The Glutton of Lyon.Before, he was just Tarare. Well-meaning and hopelessly curious, born into a world of brawling and sweet cider, to a bereaved mother and a life of slender means. The 18th Century is drawing to a close, unrest grips the heart of France and life in the village is soon shaken. When a sudden act of violence sees Tarare cast out and left for dead, his ferocious appetite is ignited, and it's not long before his extraordinary abilities to eat make him a marvel throughout the land.

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'The funniest book I've read in a long time: its deadpan, dry humour and its accumulation of absurdities will leave you rolling on your floor with laughter' The Times She thought she was a lover of the great classics of Russian literature - until she met the superfans... Roaming from Tashkent to San Francisco, this is the true story of one budding writer's strange encounters with the fanatics who are devoted - absurdly! melancholically! ecstatically! - to the Russian classics. Combining fresh readings of the great Russians from Tolstoy to Dostoevsky with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence, The Possessed is comic, humane, charming, poignant and full of an infectious love for literature. 'Dazzlingly good ... very bookish, very clever and very funny... a preposterously engaging volume' Jane Shilling, Sunday Telegraph 'The highest compliment you can pay such a book is that it sends you back to the original authors refreshed. I can go one higher - I found my

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WINNER OF THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2023 What does it mean to have 'heritage', and how do we perform or undo it? In these daring and sonorous poems, Anaxagorou conducts a researched unpacking of two countries whose dividing lines of a colonial past are still visible and felt. Uniquely engaged with the complexities of Cyprus and the diasporic experience, these poems map both an island's public history alongside a person's private reckoning. They offer a ferocious and uncompromising look towards the damaging historical structures that have led to now. Fearless, intensely honest and hopeful, Heritage Aesthetics merges Anthony's gift for performance and his brilliant experimentation with form to create a vivid insistence to communicate a self in the world.

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'The sharpest and funniest novel I read this year' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday A hilarious, intelligent cult classic, from one of the most celebrated contemporary novelists. Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid. Fuelled by strong coffee and self-prescribed tranquillizers, every day is a fresh attempt to establish a sense of self and an attitude towards his art. Not helped by his imperfect grasp of Spanish, Adam struggles with the underlying suspicion that his relationships, his reactions, even his entire personality are just as fraudulent as his poetry. Yet while his self-obsession runs riot he is at risk of missing the bigger and more urgent things that threaten to change the world around him in sudden and dramatic ways. One of the funniest and best-loved debut novels of contemporary times, Leaving the Atocha Station is a profound exploration of the creative impulse. 'Packed full of gags... Intensely and unusually brilliant' Geoff Dyer, Observer

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Four female friends navigate the political turbulence of North Belfast in the late 80s in this extraordinary, evocative verse novel We Play Here is a collection of four poem-stories, taking place in an underdeveloped area of Protestant North Belfast in the summer of 1988, against a background of political turbulence during the Troubles. Written from the perspectives of four female friends in the months between finishing primary school and starting high school, the girls inhabit an eerie, elemental landscape of normalised violence, poverty and neglect. This is a lyrical and graceful evocation of working-class childhood, and a radical approach to girlhood and girl-friendships,in the years before the trappings of gender make themselves strongly known.

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An extraordinary and playful debut collection by one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, exploring the joy and fluidity of queer love.

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A woman moves to live with her in-laws in the Japanese countryside in this haunting and surreal novel featuring a mysterious relative, an elusive hairy creature, and lots of strange holes - from the author of Weasels in the Attic

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'Baggini offers us a tempting smorgasbord of some of the most baffling, weird and occasionally downright creepy scenarios ever envisaged... enjoy these mind-boggling tales from the outer limit of thought' Guardian Is it right to eat a pig that wants to be eaten? Are you really reading this book cover, or are you in a simulation? If God is all-powerful, could he create a square circle? Here are 100 of the most intriguing thought experiments from the history of philosophy and ideas - questions to leave you inspired, informed and scratching your head, dumbfounded. A collection of short, accessible philosophical quandaries to stimulate, challenge and entertain. 'This book is like the Sudoku of moral philosophy: apply your mind to any of its "thought experiments" while stuck on the Tube, and quickly be transported out of rush-hour hell' New Statesman

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