Granta 129 brings you twenty-two meditations on fate in all its many forms. From Joseph Roth's reflection on Sarajevo in the wake of the First World War to Cynthia Ozick's exploration of the limits of belief, this issue stretches our understanding of fate, both in fact and in fiction.

Striking the keys of the same typewriter that once sat under J.G. Ballard's fingers, Will Self reimagines the legendary writer's last days. Mark Gevisser investigates transgender identities in America. Louise Erdrich presents a world where bodies can be traded in for a digital afterlife.

In an extract from her forthcoming novel, Miranda July describes the awkward dynamics between an uptight office worker, her love interest and a disruptive twenty-year-old. Fatima Bhutto depicts the mounting of tensions between Christian and Muslim families in a remote valley in Pakistan and Granta's Best of Young British Novelist Helen Oyeyemi charts a course through an age of papyrus letters and mysterious maps in Barcelona's enigmatic Casa Milà.

Fate features debut fiction by Sam Coll and S.J. Naudé, as well as new writing by Kent Haruf, Sasa Stanisic, Andrea Stuart, Anjan Sundaram, Isabella Tree and Tim Winton and poetry by Mark Doty, Adam Fitzgerald, Barbara Ras and Mary Ruefle. It includes photography of Nazi monoliths along the coastline of northwest Europe by Ianthe Ruthven and a collection of Mexican miracle paintings with an introduction by Francisco Goldman.