"A beautiful, moving, strange examination of apocalypse and rebirth.” - Neil Gaiman

"Erickson has mobilized so much of what feels pressing and urgent about the fractured state of the country in a way that feels fresh and not entirely hopeless, if only because the exercise of art in opposition to complacent thought can never be hopeless." - New York Times Book Review

A chronicle of a weird road trip, a provocative work of alternative history, and a dazzling discography of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, encompassing artists from Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, SHADOWBAHN is a richly allusive meditation on the meaning of American identity and of America itself.

"Jaw-dropping," says Jonathan Lethem (Granta).

Granta 83: This Overheating World

Not so much the state we're in as the mess we're getting into. The world we were born into has gone. We shall never completely recapture its climate, its seasons, the way its plants grew and its animals lived. This is not a wild-eyed prediction, a man on the street with a placard. Respectable science knows it and says it. Nine of the world's ten warmest years since records were kept have occurred in the past fourteen years. Every month, an English garden moves south, climatically, by a distance of one hundred yards. Who is responsible? We are our habits. Can we prevent it? Too late. Can we moderate it, slow it, reverse it? Yes- if we try. This issue of Granta contains reports from the frontiers of environment change. Contributors include: Marion Botsford-Fraser; James Hamilton-Paterson; Matthew Hart; Thomas Keneally; Philip Marsden; Bill McKibben; Wayne McLennan; Christopher de Bellaigue; James Meek; and Nuha al-Radi in Iraq. There is new fiction from Maarten 't Hart and Jon McGregor, and a picture essay by Edward Burtynsky on our industrial landscapes.

Granta 83: This Overheating World

Not so much the state we're in as the mess we're getting into. The world we were born into has gone. We shall never completely recapture its climate, its seasons, the way its plants grew and its animals lived. This is not a wild-eyed prediction, a man on the street with a placard. Respectable science knows it and says it. Nine of the world's ten warmest years since records were kept have occurred in the past fourteen years. Every month, an English garden moves south, climatically, by a distance of one hundred yards. Who is responsible? We are our habits. Can we prevent it? Too late. Can we moderate it, slow it, reverse it? Yes- if we try. This issue of Granta contains reports from the frontiers of environment change. Contributors include: Marion Botsford-Fraser; James Hamilton-Paterson; Matthew Hart; Thomas Keneally; Philip Marsden; Bill McKibben; Wayne McLennan; Christopher de Bellaigue; James Meek; and Nuha al-Radi in Iraq. There is new fiction from Maarten 't Hart and Jon McGregor, and a picture essay by Edward Burtynsky on our industrial landscapes.

As with the first two Best of Young British Novelists issues, Granta's 2003 list was compelling and prescient. The issue introduced readers to fiction by Zadie Smith, David Mitchell, and Monica Ali. From Ben Rice's story of marital crises among Koi fanciers to Hari Kunzru's account of the development of a Bollywood-inspired computer virus, this issue showcases the panorama and vibrancy of contemporary British literature.

Granta 97 : Best of Young American Novelists 2

In 1996, Granta's first Best of Young American Novelists issue included Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen and Lorrie Moore. Who will match them in the new generation? This special issue features original work by the twenty-one writers under thirty-five who Granta’s judges (including novelists Edmund White and A.M. Holmes) have selected as the most interesting new young voices in American fiction.

Review

"Sets the literary agenda for a generation."

"They say the purpose of the list is to get people talking. It's certainly done that."

"Call it 'Twenty of the Best' and get on with it. Blare the trumpets and wake the readers."

"Best of Young American Novelists is full of good writing: personable, witty, sensitive, ironic."

"Granta's hit parade is refreshing and eclectic, chock-full of strong, immensely talented young writers."

"Granta's once-a-decade literary beauty contest has already raised some hackles, and not just among those who didn't make the cut."

"Will people be reading the magazine for the content or the controversy? Who knows? In any case, Granta deserves some kind of prize."

"Ranking writers like this is pointless; it looks like a publicity stunt. But read 'em and reap: Granta has produced a handy guide to some of the best current American Fiction."

Granta Volume 93: God's Own Countries

The politics of religion around the world, featuring John McGahern, A. L. Kennedy, Richard Mabey, Simon Gray, Geoff Dyer, Jackie Kay, Pankaj Mishra, Nell Freudenberger, and more on their personal experiences—close, baffling, acrimonious, or nonexistent— of the divine.

GRANTA 85: HIDDEN HISTORIES

Repressed personal experiences, neglected battles, forgotten civilizations: an issue of Granta that excavates the unfairly buried event, the secret life, the overlooked war. With: Diana Athill on her lost baby, Giles Foden on Africa's naval war, Jennie Erdal on her career as a ghost, Brian Cathcart on the very different life of another Brian Cathcart, Donovan Wylie's photographs of a northern Irish past, Geoffrey Beattie on his Protestant childhood, Jackie Kay on finding her father, plus new fiction by Anne Enright.

In the desert, you see, there is everything and nothing . . . It is God without men.

—Honoré de Balzac, Une passion dans le désert, 1830

Jaz and Lisa Matharu are plunged into a surreal public hell after their son, Raj, vanishes during a family vacation in the California desert. However, the Mojave is a place of strange power, and before Raj reappears inexplicably unharmed—but not unchanged—the fate of this young family will intersect with that of many others, echoing the stories of all those who have traveled before them.

Driven by the energy and cunning of Coyote, the mythic, shape-shifting trickster, Gods Without Men is full of big ideas, but centered on flesh-and-blood characters who converge at an odd, remote town in the shadow of a rock formation called the Pinnacles. Viscerally gripping and intellectually engaging, it is, above all, a heartfelt exploration of the search for pattern and meaning in a chaotic universe.

The extraordinary debut collection from the Guggenheim Award-winning author of the forthcoming Gold Fame Citrus 
 
Winner of the 2012 Story Prize
Recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2013 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award
Named one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" fiction writers of 2012
Winner of New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award
NPR Best Short Story Collections of 2012
A Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Time Out New York Best Book of the year, and more . . .

Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on – and reinvents – her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, NPR,  Vanity Fair, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, The Atlantic, Refinery 29, Men's Journal, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, Book Riot, Los Angeles Magazine, Powells, BookPage and Kirkus Reviews 

The much-anticipated first novel from a Story Prize-winning “5 Under 35” fiction writer.

“At once beautiful and profoundly unsettling, [Gold Fame Citrus] sears its way into the brain, burning hot through the devastating journey and lingering long after the last page is turned.” -Elle

In 2012, Claire Vaye Watkins’s story collection, Battleborn, swept nearly every award for short fiction. Now this young writer, widely heralded as a once-in-a-generation talent, returns with a first novel that harnesses the sweeping vision and deep heart that made her debut so arresting to a love story set in a devastatingly imagined near future:

Unrelenting drought has transfigured Southern California into a surreal, phantasmagoric landscape. With the Central Valley barren, underground aquifer drained, and Sierra snowpack entirely depleted, most “Mojavs,” prevented by both armed vigilantes and an indifferent bureaucracy from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to internment camps. In Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon, two young Mojavs—Luz, once a poster child for the Bureau of Conservation and its enemies, and Ray, a veteran of the “forever war” turned surfer—squat in a starlet’s abandoned mansion. Holdouts, they subsist on rationed cola and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise.

The couple’s fragile love somehow blooms in this arid place, and for the moment, it seems enough. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins. They head east, a route strewn with danger: sinkholes and patrolling authorities, bandits and the brutal, omnipresent sun. Ghosting after them are rumors of a visionary dowser—a diviner for water—and his followers, who whispers say have formed a colony at the edge of a mysterious sea of dunes.

Immensely moving, profoundly disquieting, and mind-blowingly original, Watkins’s novel explores the myths we believe about others and tell about ourselves, the double-edged power of our most cherished relationships, and the shape of hope in a precarious future that may be our own.

On the night Janie waits for her sister, Hannah, to be born, her grandmother tells her a story: Since the Japanese occupation of Korea, their family has lost a daughter in every generation, so Janie is charged with keeping Hannah safe. As time passes, Janie hears more stories, while facts remain unspoken. Her father tells tales about numbers, and in his stories everything works out. In her mother's stories, deer explode in fields, frogs bury their loved ones in the ocean, and girls jump from cliffs and fall like flowers into the sea. Within all these stories are warnings.

Years later, when Hannah inexplicably cuts all ties and disappears, Janie embarks on a mission to find her sister and finally uncover the truth beneath her family's silence. To do so, she must confront their history, the reason for her parents' sudden move to America twenty years earlier, and ultimately her conflicted feelings toward her sister and her own role in the betrayal behind their estrangement.

Weaving Korean folklore within a modern narrative of immigration and identity, Forgotten Country is a fierce exploration of the inevitability of loss, the conflict between obligation and freedom, and a family struggling to find its way out of silence and back to one another.

Catherine Chung was born in Evanston, Illinois. She grew up in New York, New Jersey and Michigan.  She graduated with a mathematics degree from the University of Chicago, and worked at the think tank The RAND Corporation before attending Cornell University to receive her MFA.

Chung's critically acclaimed debut novel, Forgotten Country, was published in 2012 by Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Press. She has also published short stories and essays in The New York Times, The Rumpus, and Granta, and was the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize in Poetry.

She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and Jentel, and received support for her writing from The Camargo Foundation, The Jerome Foundation, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation. She was a Picador Guest Professor at The University of Leipzig, and is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Adelphi University. Catherine is the recipient of a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, a Granta New Voice, and a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine.