Granta: The Magazine of New Writing – serie

Dirty Realism is the fiction of a new generation of American authors. They write about the belly-side of contemporary life - a deserted husband, an unwed mother, a car thief, a pickpocket, a drug addict - but they write about it with a disturbing detachment, at times verging on comedy. Understated, ironic, sometimes savage, but insistently compassionate, these stories constitute a new voice in fiction. In this special feature, Granta presents a group of younger authors - many published in Britain for the first time - who, writing in a strange, exaggerated style, have single-handedly revitalized the short story. 'These writers,' Tobias Wolff has observed, 'while not necessarily a school, nevertheless form a new voice. They are able to speak to us about the things that matter.'

Boris is a novella that works on several levels: a love-story, a tragedy, a depiction of pain and self-destruction. It is a moving and strangely understated chronicle of an obsession, but it is an obsession with political and historical implications that extend far beyond its seemingly straight-forward, spartan narrative.John Berger won the Booker Price for his novel G. He is also the author of the much acclaimed Ways of Seeing and Pig Earth. Boris is his first published fiction in over four years, and its eloquent sadness clearly reaffirms Susan Sontag's claim: 'John Berger writes about what is important, not just interesting. In contemporary English letters he seems to me peerless; not since Lawrence has there been a writer who offers such attentiveness to the sensual world.'

Travel writing is undergoing a revival: not since the 1920s and '30s has it been so popular or so important. What accounts for its sudden appeal? A need for escape? Nostalgia for an experience that means not tourism but adventure? Or does travel writing - being part reportage, part fiction, and part meditation - express concerns that we rarely see addressed in other forms of writing? This issue, the tenth edition of Granta, is devoted to the work of some of today's most important travel writers, including the already established and those just beginning to build their reputations.

What is Milan Kundera's writing about? Sexual conquest and Russian tanks, arousal and totalitarian repression, infidelity and political betrayal, desire and the quiet tragedy of Europe. Kundera is a literary acrobat, a master of paradox and parody. An exile from communism and a critic of the West, a sceptic and irrepressible story-teller, an erotic hedonist whose life is politicized in the extreme, Kundera is as surprising and as unpredictable as the contemporary world he addresses.The current issue of Granta publishes, for the first time in Britain, a collection of Kundera's newest work, representing the range and power of an author whom more and more people have come to recognize as one of the most important writers to have emerged in the last ten years.

Ten years ago, James Fenton went to Saigon, having made up his mind that, no matter what happened, he was not going to miss what he had travelled 10,000 miles to see: a Communist victory. And so he remained, long after the US troops and most members of the western press had been evacuated. He remained for, and even participated in, the looting of the US Embassy. And when the first North Vietnamese tank entered the city, lost, unable to make its way through Saigon's maze of streets, James Fenton jumped on the back, an unlikely navigator, directing the tank commander to the Presidential Palace. And still Fenton remained, until three months later, without food or money or clothes, wandering around a city transformed, he finally made his way back home.Witty, bizarre, and verging on the lunatic - who in his right mind would hop on the back of an invading army's tank? - James Fenton's account of the fall of Saigon is an extraordinary and historically important record of the collapse of a city at war.

For the last thirty or forty years, it has been a commonplace that science and literature don't mix. But recently science writing has undergone a revival and has come to constitute a literature in itself. What accounts for its sudden appeal? That attraction of facts? Or the possibility that 'facts' are themselves inventions of the most spectacular kind?Granta 16, 'Science' is devoted to representing part of this revival. In 'Excesses', Oliver Sacks describes individuals suffering from not only too much personality but too many. In 'Amazon', Eugene Richards and Dorothea Lynch document the terrible mystery of illness and the body. The sexuality of tortoises, the lunacy of invention, the bizarre mating habits of a tropical rodent, the zoo-like existence of the young scientists of Reagan's Star Wars - all invite us to understand 'science' not simply as the study of fact but also as another way, not unlike the novel, of describing the mystery of the world.

Over the course of the last five years, more and more people have realized that the dominant voice in American fiction is altogether different from what it was. Three years ago, Granta devoted an issue to this new voice, entitled 'Dirty Realism', and published in it the work of eight authors, whose stories, - spare, unillusioned, but compassionate - invoked, with a curious coherence of style, the belly-side of American life: trailers parks, roadside cafés and small mid-western towns. In 'More Dirt' Granta offers fiction not only from many of the contributors to 'Dirty Realism', but also from a number of younger writers - including some who are not widely known... yet.

James Fenton is a rather peculiar individual.He was, after all, among the first to loot the US Embassy as the city of Saigon fell. This year, he found himself in the Presidential Palace in Manila, and his booty included one towel (with the monogram of Imelda Marcos) and a letter to President Macros - resting alongside the grand piano, on which James Fenton managed to play a version of Bach's Prelude in C (abruptly abbreviated), while the population of Manila rioted.But James Fenton's version of the Philippines is more than a record of being at the right place at the worst of possible times. It is also an account of one of the most historic uprisings in recent years - in which an entire people, cheated of its vote in a snap election, responded in turn: with a snap revolution.

What does 'story-teller' suggest? Folk-tales, myths, sea voyages, a cartoon campfire: in short, a way of writing that is distinctly unmodern. Granta 21 presents the work of three authors who are, in their way, distinctly and deliberately unmodern.Bruce Chatwin follows nomads through the Sahara and the Aborigines across Australia, as they sing an entire continent into existence.Ryszard Kapuscinski returns from central Africa with stories - 'felt on the surface of my skin' - to tell people desperate to discover the outside world.And in 'A Story for Aesop', John Berger defines the story-teller: a witness who has become historian, a contemporary who is not modern - detached, sceptical and intensely compassionate.

What is Nadia - living over there in Pakistan - really like? A girl of bangles and perfume and lots of money, forever sitting under a palm tree, drinking yogurt?And what is Nina - living over there in London - really like? A wild animal, a brute hardened by drugs and thieving and massage parlours?And what happens when Nadia and Nina, two half-sisters who have never met, are brought together for the first time? What will Dad make of it, or Wifey, or the Flounder, or the fat ones, Moonie and Gloomie?In his first novella, Hanif Kureishi - author of 'My Beautiful Launderette' - has written the most original and comic work of fiction to have appeared in Britain - the 'other' Britain - in many years.

Prague, Beirut, Des Moines, the ugliest village in Essex. What is home for an Arab in Israel? For an ex-patriot returning for the Iowa Country Fair? For a man surrounded by chickens?Plus:Nicholas Shakespeare, in the Andes of Peru.T. Coraghessan Boyle, witnessing miracles in Ireland.Ian Hamilton, in pursuit of J. D. Salinger.Charles Nicholl, watching blood sports in Martinique.

Five years ago, Granta published 'Travel Writing'.Five years ago there was a travel writing revival, and the revival continues today. There are hundreds of magazines of travel writing; there are television and radio programmes; there are publishers devoted exclusively to it - and Granta's first issue has been reprinted eleven times.What kind of writing do travel writers write now? What, after a five-year revival, is travel writing? How long can the exotic remain exotic?Five years ago, the most influential travel writer was the one who showed that the best travel writing is not about the exotic or travel at all, but, borrowing from history and fact and the imagination, about something else entirely. His name is Bruce Chatwin.'Travel' is dedicated to his memory.

This edition of Granta has articles by Martha Gellhorn, Eleanor Roosevelt, Oliver Sacks, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Raymond Chandler and Patrick Leigh Fermor. There are examples of letters to Chinese dissidents, letters to pop stars, hate letters, publishers' rejection letters to Elliot, Philip Larkin and Wittgenstein and Mandela's prison letters.

Granta is ten years old. And its 'Birthday Special' is a celebration, a merry miscellany, a mad editorial tea party of some of the writers who, since 1979, have made Granta the most widely read literary magazine in the English language.

What does it mean to leave your country?Is it possible, by travelling to a New World, to become a new person?A year ago, Jonathan Raban crossed the Atlantic by ship and, like the immigrants before him, made for America.The first of four installments, 'New World' is the story of his journey, a journey in search of a new language, a new name, a new identity. A life.

Many things have been said about General Alfredo Stroessner, the 'President' of Paraguay for thirty-five years. These are ten of them:1. That he was the longest-reigning dictator in the history of South America.2. That his country was a haven for Nazis.3. That, before he came to power, there was no electricity or running water.4. That, after he came to power, the trains ran on time. 5. That on Thursdays, at three-fifteen, he could be found on the ranch near the Avenida Aviadores del Chaco - his guards posted at the gates - visiting his mistress.6. That he 'bought' virgin schoolgirls from their parents.7. That no man had more wealth.8. That no man showed off his wealth less.9. That no man was more feared. 10. That Richard Nixon was his friend.But these points, like so many others, are only speculation: The General doesn't grant interviews. Until, nine months after he was deposed, he was tracked down by Isabel Hilton who spent three days with him, tape recorder running.

Granta's 'History' is devoted to history of the most old-fashioned kind: historia in its original Greek sense. A chronicle of events with a beginning, a middle and an end.'History' is also about how we make these chronicles. How we manipulate facts. How we exploit and shape and bend memory. How we make up stories to make sense of our past.

On a Friday afternoon in late November, George Parkman - doctor of medicine, austere tenement landlord, benevolent student of the disturbed - disappeared and was never seen again.He disappeared even though he was, at the very same time, said to be in Court Street, in Milk Street, in Blossom Street, in the Harvard Medical College, in a greengrocer's buying a lettuce. And it was also said that he was the one found in a tea-chest - cold and repellent, a headless trunk, a great mat of hair clinging to the back - murdered by a Harvard professor of chemistry. Was he?One hundred and twenty-nine years later Simon Schama sets out to discover which story, if any story, is the story of the many stories of the disappearance of Doctor George Parkman, the perfect Yankee.

This anthology introduces the reader to three Americans behaving badly abroad in stories by Richard Ford, Paul Theroux and William T. Vollman. Also in this issue are pieces by Alan Lightman, Ken Light, Richard Rayner, Nadine Gordimer and others in South Africa.

Why do biographies remain so popular? "Granta 41" presents a special collection of biographies organized around a single idea - how do you tell the story of a life?. Also in this issue is the exclusive first publication of Saul Bellow's "Memoirs of a Bootlegger's Son", James Atlas on Bellow's apprenticeship in Chicago, Andrew Motion on the discovery of Philip Larkin's secret Northumberland hideaway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez on the mysterious Frau Frida whom he first met in Vienna after the war, plus Richard Holmes, Ian Hamilton, Louise Eldrich, Lorna Sage, and Luc Sante amid the police archives of 1914 New York.