Oh, Granta, how I love thee. How I salivate when I see you. How I want to hold you, flip through your pages, read your author summaries, pore over your photos.
I once told a friend that one of my fantasies was going to a garage sale and finding a whole bunch of Grantas but for really cheap, like 25 cents each so I could get all the ones I don't have, so I could be Granta-guaranteed for a year and a day. My friend looked at me like maybe I need to work on my fantasies.
Then another friend, who first started my Granta addiction, moved to Iqaluit where there seems to be endless supplies of Granta everywhere: lying next to dog sleds, rolling in the tundra, holding up houses, mopping up seal blood. In her abundant generosity, she started sending me issues that she found in the street or abandoned in bathrooms. Wipe off the blood stains and they are good as new. I think there is a tourism-marketing strategy that Nunavut could exploit here: Come to the North, you will have a good read!
Just read A. L. Kennedy's Story of my life, in Granta 105 and I want to jump at the sheer talent of the writing. Damn, it's good. Even Richard Ford, who normally I don't have much time for, is good in Granta (The Womanizer, Granta 40). And that one by Hanif Kureishi about being a loser in Pakistan. Oohhhh.
