Vile Bodies, Vile Places: Traveling with Granta

Abstract

Twelve years ago, Granta was nearly defunct student publication named for river in Cambridge, England. Then brash young American named Bill Buford took it over, badgered some well-known writers into contributing, and made deal with Penguin Books to publish the magazine as quarterly paperback. Granta's first Penguin issue carried big names like Susan Sontag, Donald Barthelme, and John Hawkes; by i985, with issue #i5, Buford had similar agreement with Viking Penguin for U.S. distribution, and Granta was on its way to being one of the most influential literary publications in the English-speaking world. Some of this influence may derive merely from Buford's chutzpah and the power of multinational publishing company, but the magazine is good. First-rate work by writers like Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Vaclav Havel, Heinrich Bo511, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez appears regularly in And there's something attractive about Granta's overall shape. magazine takes broad view of what constitutes literature, putting nonfiction like cultural essays and travel writing on equal footing with fiction. Granta assumes easily that writing is international, and that it is, or should be, political. As Buford puts it in the preface to Granta #6, Literature for Politics, Granta seeks a literature that is adversary to oppression and not accomplice to it. In some ways, Granta can claim to have lived up to the straightforward aim of being an adversary of oppression. In issue #I I, Salman Rushdie critiqued neocolonialism with brilliant essay about the fantasized resurgence of the British Raj in TV programs like The Jewel in the Crown, relating that fantasy to actual conditions in Thatcher's England. In #I5, Nadine Gordimer described the writer's responsibility, arguing that art is on the side of the oppressed. A more recent issue (#23) pushed the boundaries of literature and politics by carrying Fawwaz Traboulsi's description of the weapons