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Granta: The Magazine of New Writing #154
Granta 154: I’ve Been Away for a While
Four times a year, Britain's most prestigious literary magazine brings you the best in contemporary fiction, memoir, reportage, poetry and photography from around the world.
This issue features Lindsey Hilsum, author of the award-winning In Extremis, on cholera in Hutu refugee camps; Ian Jack on the toxic slag heaps of Glasgow and the aristocratic lives built on them; memoir by Vidyan Ravinthiran and Rory Gleeson; and poetry by Jason Allen-Paisant and Anthony Anaxagorou. Plus, new fiction from Paul Dalla Rosa, shortlisted for the 2019 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and Gwendoline Riley, author of First Love.
This issue features Lindsey Hilsum, author of the award-winning In Extremis, on cholera in Hutu refugee camps; Ian Jack on the toxic slag heaps of Glasgow and the aristocratic lives built on them; memoir by Vidyan Ravinthiran and Rory Gleeson; and poetry by Jason Allen-Paisant and Anthony Anaxagorou. Plus, new fiction from Paul Dalla Rosa, shortlisted for the 2019 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and Gwendoline Riley, author of First Love.
- GenresFiction
223 pages, Paperback
Published February 11, 2021
11 people are currently reading
46 people want to read
About the author
Sigrid Rausing
45 books52 followersSigrid Rausing is Editor and Publisher of Granta magazine and Publisher of Granta and Portobello Books. She is the author of History, Memory and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia: The End of a Collective Farm and Everything is Wonderful, which has been translated into four different languages.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
March 9, 2021
Two particularly superb essays in this edition -- either of which would be worth the cover price. (Plenty of other very good pieces, and an excerpt from Gwendoline Riley's best novel thus far -- pretty unmissable issue.)
'Old money’s distaste for new money was only partly to blame for his in-laws’ hostility. Tennant was also known to be a libertine – a Mayfair brothel-goer who on his honeymoon took his wife to a seedy Paris hotel to watch another couple having sex (‘two really disgusting people . . . squelching about, and I didn’t really know what to do so I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes’ was how she described the episode on Norton’s show). Princess Margaret, who knew him before his marriage, described him to his bride’s mother as a ‘fairly decadent fellow’, but decadence was only half the story. He was extravagant, capricious and wilful, and given to extraordinary tantrums, seizure-like in their sudden arrival and ferocity, which alarmed anyone unlucky enough to witness them. His temper brought an opera to a halt in Verona’s amphitheatre and enraged the crowd in a Delhi bazaar. Setting out with his wife and Princess Margaret on a transatlantic flight, and refused an upgrade so that he could join them in first class, he lay down in the foetal position in the aisle of economy and wailed and screamed until security arrived and dragged him from the plane. (British Airways then banned him for life.) And his wilfulness could be expensive: he bought the Caribbean island of Mustique without setting foot on it and bought and sold homes in London at a perplexing, unprofitable rate.' (Ian Jack -- The Stinky Ocean)
'In the spring, about two weeks into the coronavirus lockdown, I found myself thinking about cholera. More specifically, about the 1994 epidemic that killed tens of thousands of Rwandans in Goma, in the east of what was then called Zaire. Initially confined to my home, for me the corona pandemic signified absence: no contact with other people, no travel, no access to the sick and dying. In Goma, by contrast, you could not escape the disease. The sick collapsed in the street or on the fields of sharp black volcanic rock that surrounded the town. They died where they fell. Bodies lay unburied, covered by a blanket or wrapped in rush matting. If you weren’t careful, you might trip over them.
I remembered walking into a tent erected by one of the aid agencies to see dozens of people sprawled semi-conscious on the ground, their eyes glassy, some drooling thick white saliva, family members sitting next to them, cradling their heads. A lone doctor stood in the middle, crying.
‘They’re just dying and dying,’ she sobbed. ‘What can I do?’
The symptoms of cholera are easy to detect: white watery stools and vomit, leading to such a rapid loss of fluids that the eyes begin to sink into the skull and the teeth protrude. Untreated, cholera can cause death in twelve hours, although it’s easily cured by rehydration, administered either orally or intravenously. But the doctor had no drips left, or any oral rehydration salts, or – even more critically – a regular supply of clean water. I began to cry too, as we stood together watching people die.
Through my tears, however, I was aware of an uncomfortable reality: the people dying had, not long before, been killing. They were Hutus, Rwanda’s majority ethnic group. That April, following the shooting down of a plane carrying the Rwandan president, also a Hutu, their leaders had instructed them to kill their neighbours from the minority Tutsi ethnic group. Lawyers do not accept the idea of a collective crime, but a large proportion of the Hutu population, both men and women, played some part in the genocide, even if only by failing to protect the victims, or turning a blind eye to the killing. In villages and towns across Rwanda, the ideology of ‘Hutu Power’ – code for exterminating the Tutsis – took hold, and people who had never committed crimes before were mobilised to murder. I had seen something of the genocide myself, as I had been living in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, when it started. Watching cholera take hold in Goma, I was assailed by the violent images I had seen a few weeks earlier: truckloads of people slashed by machetes or beaten with nail-studded clubs arriving at hospital, drunken men armed with broken beer bottles waving me through roadblocks, flies buzzing over four women with their throats slit outside a clinic.
The Hutus in Goma were generally referred to as refugees, but were they in fact fugitives?' (Lindsey Hilsum -- When The Cholera Came)
'Old money’s distaste for new money was only partly to blame for his in-laws’ hostility. Tennant was also known to be a libertine – a Mayfair brothel-goer who on his honeymoon took his wife to a seedy Paris hotel to watch another couple having sex (‘two really disgusting people . . . squelching about, and I didn’t really know what to do so I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes’ was how she described the episode on Norton’s show). Princess Margaret, who knew him before his marriage, described him to his bride’s mother as a ‘fairly decadent fellow’, but decadence was only half the story. He was extravagant, capricious and wilful, and given to extraordinary tantrums, seizure-like in their sudden arrival and ferocity, which alarmed anyone unlucky enough to witness them. His temper brought an opera to a halt in Verona’s amphitheatre and enraged the crowd in a Delhi bazaar. Setting out with his wife and Princess Margaret on a transatlantic flight, and refused an upgrade so that he could join them in first class, he lay down in the foetal position in the aisle of economy and wailed and screamed until security arrived and dragged him from the plane. (British Airways then banned him for life.) And his wilfulness could be expensive: he bought the Caribbean island of Mustique without setting foot on it and bought and sold homes in London at a perplexing, unprofitable rate.' (Ian Jack -- The Stinky Ocean)
'In the spring, about two weeks into the coronavirus lockdown, I found myself thinking about cholera. More specifically, about the 1994 epidemic that killed tens of thousands of Rwandans in Goma, in the east of what was then called Zaire. Initially confined to my home, for me the corona pandemic signified absence: no contact with other people, no travel, no access to the sick and dying. In Goma, by contrast, you could not escape the disease. The sick collapsed in the street or on the fields of sharp black volcanic rock that surrounded the town. They died where they fell. Bodies lay unburied, covered by a blanket or wrapped in rush matting. If you weren’t careful, you might trip over them.
I remembered walking into a tent erected by one of the aid agencies to see dozens of people sprawled semi-conscious on the ground, their eyes glassy, some drooling thick white saliva, family members sitting next to them, cradling their heads. A lone doctor stood in the middle, crying.
‘They’re just dying and dying,’ she sobbed. ‘What can I do?’
The symptoms of cholera are easy to detect: white watery stools and vomit, leading to such a rapid loss of fluids that the eyes begin to sink into the skull and the teeth protrude. Untreated, cholera can cause death in twelve hours, although it’s easily cured by rehydration, administered either orally or intravenously. But the doctor had no drips left, or any oral rehydration salts, or – even more critically – a regular supply of clean water. I began to cry too, as we stood together watching people die.
Through my tears, however, I was aware of an uncomfortable reality: the people dying had, not long before, been killing. They were Hutus, Rwanda’s majority ethnic group. That April, following the shooting down of a plane carrying the Rwandan president, also a Hutu, their leaders had instructed them to kill their neighbours from the minority Tutsi ethnic group. Lawyers do not accept the idea of a collective crime, but a large proportion of the Hutu population, both men and women, played some part in the genocide, even if only by failing to protect the victims, or turning a blind eye to the killing. In villages and towns across Rwanda, the ideology of ‘Hutu Power’ – code for exterminating the Tutsis – took hold, and people who had never committed crimes before were mobilised to murder. I had seen something of the genocide myself, as I had been living in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, when it started. Watching cholera take hold in Goma, I was assailed by the violent images I had seen a few weeks earlier: truckloads of people slashed by machetes or beaten with nail-studded clubs arriving at hospital, drunken men armed with broken beer bottles waving me through roadblocks, flies buzzing over four women with their throats slit outside a clinic.
The Hutus in Goma were generally referred to as refugees, but were they in fact fugitives?' (Lindsey Hilsum -- When The Cholera Came)
December 16, 2022
4.5*
Favourites:
I’ve Been Away for a While
The Stinky Ocean
When the Cholera Came --> the second of Lindsey Hilsum’s essays I have read on Rwanda. Definitely need to check out her book. She has such a great writing style!
Abbandonati
My Phantoms --> this was just a few chapters, now off to start reading the whole book
The three Granta issues I have read have quickly become favourites - as always absorbing essays, stories and new writers to discover!
But its light out, painfully bright, the clouds seem to be illuminated from within. I’ve been away for a while but I know these streets better than I know myself. But I’ve never seen a sunrise like this before. No one should be seeing this, I think. We must not know how insane we really are. Dreaming under the spell of these clouds that don’t cast shadows and whose light is a delerium.
- I’ve Been Away for a While. Dan Shurley
It was hard not to wonder if the disease was a kind of divine retribution - collective punishment for a collective crime. When this unmodern thought drifted across my mind I tried to dismiss it. It was not, after all, how I looked at the world. But it wouldn’t go away.
In poor countries, conflict always brings hunger, disease and hardship in its wake. People die unseen and uncounted, because the hospitals no longer function, or because the vaccination programme has collapsed, or because malnutrition renders them susceptible to tuberculosis or malaria. Deaths from bombs or bullets attract more attention because they’re spectacular.
- When the Cholera Came. Lindsey Hilsum
The gatekeeping of emotion, the imposed hierarchy of legitimate and illegitimate sufferings.
- Victim and Accused. Vidyan Rivanthiran
Favourites:
I’ve Been Away for a While
The Stinky Ocean
When the Cholera Came --> the second of Lindsey Hilsum’s essays I have read on Rwanda. Definitely need to check out her book. She has such a great writing style!
Abbandonati
My Phantoms --> this was just a few chapters, now off to start reading the whole book
The three Granta issues I have read have quickly become favourites - as always absorbing essays, stories and new writers to discover!
But its light out, painfully bright, the clouds seem to be illuminated from within. I’ve been away for a while but I know these streets better than I know myself. But I’ve never seen a sunrise like this before. No one should be seeing this, I think. We must not know how insane we really are. Dreaming under the spell of these clouds that don’t cast shadows and whose light is a delerium.
- I’ve Been Away for a While. Dan Shurley
It was hard not to wonder if the disease was a kind of divine retribution - collective punishment for a collective crime. When this unmodern thought drifted across my mind I tried to dismiss it. It was not, after all, how I looked at the world. But it wouldn’t go away.
In poor countries, conflict always brings hunger, disease and hardship in its wake. People die unseen and uncounted, because the hospitals no longer function, or because the vaccination programme has collapsed, or because malnutrition renders them susceptible to tuberculosis or malaria. Deaths from bombs or bullets attract more attention because they’re spectacular.
- When the Cholera Came. Lindsey Hilsum
The gatekeeping of emotion, the imposed hierarchy of legitimate and illegitimate sufferings.
- Victim and Accused. Vidyan Rivanthiran
July 2, 2021
As usual with Granta, high quality writing, both fiction and non-fiction.
My favorite were: Permafrost b Eva Baltasar, The Stiky Ocean by Ian Jack, In Bright Light by Paul Dalla Rosa, and When the Cholera Came by Lindsey Hilsum.
Memorable passages:
"...images like these make me re-evaluate my love affair with death." p. 15
"A work of art isn't only the end result -- it's art n time, art in real time, in action, as simple and impulsive as a drawing by a child. But there's a sophisticated concern below the surface, an interest in process -- life's immensity concentrated in that process."
p.16
"...she had the ability to apply font to speech." p. 17
"Like a very small dog, her younger niece had too much energy in too small a container." p. 81
"To spend time is to use up our lives." p. 146
"The flames look in the black-and-white image so absolutely white it's as if reality is being erased." p. 149
My favorite were: Permafrost b Eva Baltasar, The Stiky Ocean by Ian Jack, In Bright Light by Paul Dalla Rosa, and When the Cholera Came by Lindsey Hilsum.
Memorable passages:
"...images like these make me re-evaluate my love affair with death." p. 15
"A work of art isn't only the end result -- it's art n time, art in real time, in action, as simple and impulsive as a drawing by a child. But there's a sophisticated concern below the surface, an interest in process -- life's immensity concentrated in that process."
p.16
"...she had the ability to apply font to speech." p. 17
"Like a very small dog, her younger niece had too much energy in too small a container." p. 81
"To spend time is to use up our lives." p. 146
"The flames look in the black-and-white image so absolutely white it's as if reality is being erased." p. 149
February 6, 2021
Granta 154. Excellent articles by Lindsey Hilsum on the Rwandan genocide and subsequent cholera outbreak, Ian Jack on Glasgow's industrial heritage, Rory Gleeson on the early days of the pandemic in Italy and fiction by Gwendoline Riley.
February 25, 2021
Two articles red-circled in this: Ian Jack's 'The Stinky Ocean' and Vidyan Ravinthiran;s 'Victim and Accused' which was hugely thought-provoking.
A coupe of others, unreadable (One of which was Gwen Riley; I see I am at odds with many reviewers here).
A coupe of others, unreadable (One of which was Gwen Riley; I see I am at odds with many reviewers here).
November 5, 2021
great as always
April 16, 2021
Sadly a very poor issue. Is it me, or is the standard of Granta slipping?
March 16, 2021
For me this issue "read" unevenly. Stellar work interspersed with flat.
Stellar: Gwendoline Riley's "My Phantoms" - memories of a father inflated by narcissism and the toll it took.
Vidyan Ravinthiran's "Victim and Accused" - turning to poetry and history to explore killers-turned-victims-turned-killers in Sri Lanka, Nazi Europe, Africa - and how an immigrant copes with
guilt and understanding.
Lindsey Hilsum's "When Cholera Came" just simply blew me away.
And Ian Jack's "The Stinky Ocean" is full of food for thought about fortunes built on the backs of ecological and human disaster.
Dan Shurley's "I've Been Away For A While" - just read it. Amazing.
Not a depressing collection of work, but rather a very telling and truthful one.
Stellar: Gwendoline Riley's "My Phantoms" - memories of a father inflated by narcissism and the toll it took.
Vidyan Ravinthiran's "Victim and Accused" - turning to poetry and history to explore killers-turned-victims-turned-killers in Sri Lanka, Nazi Europe, Africa - and how an immigrant copes with
guilt and understanding.
Lindsey Hilsum's "When Cholera Came" just simply blew me away.
And Ian Jack's "The Stinky Ocean" is full of food for thought about fortunes built on the backs of ecological and human disaster.
Dan Shurley's "I've Been Away For A While" - just read it. Amazing.
Not a depressing collection of work, but rather a very telling and truthful one.
February 14, 2021
I watched the launch event for Granta 154 online where most of the writers, poets, and photographers gave a reading and short interviews. This really adds to the enjoyment of this new collection. Out of the five fiction pieces, the best was the extract from Gwendoline Riley's new book where she talks about her relationship with her father when she was a teenager. It feels autobiographical but that's probably because it's so good. The non-fiction standout is Rory Gleeson's Abandonnatti for its 100 percent relevance to where we are now in pandemic lockdown. Pest poem is Nate Duke's poem of working on a pig farm. It helps that I heard him read it at the recent virtual launch.
Rory Gleeson's Abandonatti is a visceral blow by blow account of the pandemic as it unfolded in Northern Italy in February 2020. It's told from a point of view that was pre-pandemic pre-first wave. Oh, we are so much wiser now that we are past the peak of the third wave. Amazing the description of the naming and othering of patient zero. What he did was totally normal before our behaviour and what we judge acceptable changed.
Ian Jack Stinky ocean how the upper-class made their money and get to lord it over the people who live in tenements. Brilliant piece of investigative journalism.
In Bright Light - Paul Della Rosa. This is about an actor on the downward curve of her career who said me and nearly said metoo. But she eventually did say me too and she got $2.8 million when her career was dropping. Great story very incisive look into the many layers of the murky world of Hollywood which is a business like any other.
When the Cholera Came by Lindsay Hilsum. This author went back to her notes from Rwanda in 1996 when there was a cholera outbreak after the Rwandan genocide. Has the hindsight of history and is a story well written. Anything to do with a disease resonates so differently for us now.
Victim and Accused by Vidyan Rivanthiran tells the story of the aftermath of the conflict in Sri Lanka. He covers the intergenerational connections between those who experience violence and those who don't. This really has echoes of what it was like living through the 70s in the Republic of Ireland when the Troubles were at their height in the North.
Colville is a photo essay by Fergus Thomas who visits the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation horse race Native Americans. Interview with the main character who does bareback horse racing includes the Annual Suicide Race down a hill into and across a river. At the magazine launch, Fergus Thomas showed the photos and talked a little about how welcome he was made to feel there.
2nd Photo essay is of a Muslim cemetery in South East London during the height of the first wave of Covid-19.
Permafrost is an English translation of a Catalan poet. She writes about the joys of sex between two women which morphs into an exploration of a mole by a dermatologist.
Rory Gleeson's Abandonatti is a visceral blow by blow account of the pandemic as it unfolded in Northern Italy in February 2020. It's told from a point of view that was pre-pandemic pre-first wave. Oh, we are so much wiser now that we are past the peak of the third wave. Amazing the description of the naming and othering of patient zero. What he did was totally normal before our behaviour and what we judge acceptable changed.
Ian Jack Stinky ocean how the upper-class made their money and get to lord it over the people who live in tenements. Brilliant piece of investigative journalism.
In Bright Light - Paul Della Rosa. This is about an actor on the downward curve of her career who said me and nearly said metoo. But she eventually did say me too and she got $2.8 million when her career was dropping. Great story very incisive look into the many layers of the murky world of Hollywood which is a business like any other.
When the Cholera Came by Lindsay Hilsum. This author went back to her notes from Rwanda in 1996 when there was a cholera outbreak after the Rwandan genocide. Has the hindsight of history and is a story well written. Anything to do with a disease resonates so differently for us now.
Victim and Accused by Vidyan Rivanthiran tells the story of the aftermath of the conflict in Sri Lanka. He covers the intergenerational connections between those who experience violence and those who don't. This really has echoes of what it was like living through the 70s in the Republic of Ireland when the Troubles were at their height in the North.
Colville is a photo essay by Fergus Thomas who visits the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation horse race Native Americans. Interview with the main character who does bareback horse racing includes the Annual Suicide Race down a hill into and across a river. At the magazine launch, Fergus Thomas showed the photos and talked a little about how welcome he was made to feel there.
2nd Photo essay is of a Muslim cemetery in South East London during the height of the first wave of Covid-19.
Permafrost is an English translation of a Catalan poet. She writes about the joys of sex between two women which morphs into an exploration of a mole by a dermatologist.
March 16, 2021
I could so easily have given this issue 2 stars were it not for the breakout excerpt from Permafrost by Eva Baltasar and the ever interesting (and much missed as Editor) Ian Jack’s autobiographical essay. The Scarecrow by Diaa Jubaili deserves a mention though it barely covers a page. The remainder eminently forgettable, politically correct reportage, tedious in its reading and depressing in its effect. The issue ends with a truly dispiriting and distasteful memoir/narrative of a child's contempt for her parents.
Photography featuring American Indians and Muslim corpses.
Reading Granta since it's very first issue, its saddening to witness its slow decline. Whatever happened to its identity as a literary periodical? Literature?
Where imaginative and original writing is included, as with Baltasar, Jack and Jubaili, it's only to sweeten the pill for what's to come.
The publisher needs to relinquish the editorship. Granta deserves better than this.
Photography featuring American Indians and Muslim corpses.
Reading Granta since it's very first issue, its saddening to witness its slow decline. Whatever happened to its identity as a literary periodical? Literature?
Where imaginative and original writing is included, as with Baltasar, Jack and Jubaili, it's only to sweeten the pill for what's to come.
The publisher needs to relinquish the editorship. Granta deserves better than this.
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February 10, 2021This subscription was a Christmas present, and one very gratefully received! The writing is excellent, even if not all to my taste. Highlights include: ‘Permafrost’ by Eva Baltasar, ‘In Bright Light’ by Paul Dalla Rosa, and the exceptionally painful ‘My Phantoms’ by Gwendoline Riley. In terms of non-fiction, Rory Gleeson’s piece ‘Abbandonati’ about the pandemic is chilling and prescient, and ‘When the Cholera Came’, Lindsey Hilsum’s memories of the Rwandan genocide and subsequent cholera outbreak, is a tough, poignant read.
March 19, 2021
This issue felt more disjointed to me than what I’m used to with Granta: even the individual stories seemed to fluctuate in emotional tone and storytelling pace. Maybe I was expecting too much after a very intriguing introduction from the editor that addressed connection in a time of isolation. But after that, I actually felt strangely disconnected from the writing and it took a while to feel like I was immersed in Granta-land again.
March 24, 2021
Very good essays by Ian Jack, Lindsey Hilsum and Rory Gleeson. Permafrost by Eva Balthasar starts of wonderful, but then veers if in a very strange direction. Gwendoline Rileys story about her phantom is nice. Most other stories and essays were unreadable. Beautiful photographs by Fergus Thomas; harrowing ones by Gus Palmer.
March 5, 2021
Top 3: Eva BALTASAR, Rory GLEESON en Gwendoline RILEY
March 29, 2025
Granta is maybe the best known magazine for short fiction, essays and poetry around the world, and one of my favorites. This issue was published in the winter of 2021 so unfortunately is a little dated with references to Covid and the insane lock downs. On the other side of the spectrum, I liked the most the excerpt from a novel My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley, a study of shame and family.
May 23, 2024
Last year, I realised that the ambit of my reading was significantly narrower than what I wanted it to be. I was reading the same authors, the same kinds of authors, the same kinds of themes (especially for non-fic) and books from the same few shops. I decided I would pick up a few journals and magazines of issue-based short and long form work, and figured that even if I was picking the publication, someone else was picking the content in a venn diagram of my interests and theirs. I really enjoyed this issue of Granta, and the three star review is likely a product of my desire to review books in their entirely (not just the best part of it), to consider how recommendable they are, and to consider how I’d been challenged.
The first story in this issue is about (a few things but also) a young woman who is going to the doctor and seeking diagnosis of a melanoma, which turns out to not be a melanoma. By some freak accident this is the book that I (a young, female, recent melanoma survivor) had picked up, and the injustice of that accidentally hurtful piece reminded me that maybe it’s okay to not be challenged by things when you’re sad about them.
The first story in this issue is about (a few things but also) a young woman who is going to the doctor and seeking diagnosis of a melanoma, which turns out to not be a melanoma. By some freak accident this is the book that I (a young, female, recent melanoma survivor) had picked up, and the injustice of that accidentally hurtful piece reminded me that maybe it’s okay to not be challenged by things when you’re sad about them.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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August 28, 2022I enjoyed Dan Shurley’s “I’ve Been Away...”, Paul Dalla Rosa’s “In Bright Light”, and the photo essay, Colville by Fergus Thomas.
Gwendolyn Riley’s “My Phantoms” is so well-written that it is uncomfortable.
Diaa Jubaili’s “The Scarecrow” is a powerful page of short fiction.
The Poems by Nate Duke and Jason Allen-Paisant resonated with me. Lindsey Hilsum writing on the tragedy of Rwanda is devastating, but the frequency of her writing on the topic is deadening. I have to wonder about that.
Vidyan Ravinthiran writes movingly about empathy, poetry, bullying, victimization, and accusation.
And Ian Jack writes about Glasgow in a way that perfectly matches my impression of that city, gleaned from a three day stay some 30 years ago.
Oh, and the cover, a painting by Tom Hammick, is beautiful and perfectly, unintentionally, illustrative of the title.
Gwendolyn Riley’s “My Phantoms” is so well-written that it is uncomfortable.
Diaa Jubaili’s “The Scarecrow” is a powerful page of short fiction.
The Poems by Nate Duke and Jason Allen-Paisant resonated with me. Lindsey Hilsum writing on the tragedy of Rwanda is devastating, but the frequency of her writing on the topic is deadening. I have to wonder about that.
Vidyan Ravinthiran writes movingly about empathy, poetry, bullying, victimization, and accusation.
And Ian Jack writes about Glasgow in a way that perfectly matches my impression of that city, gleaned from a three day stay some 30 years ago.
Oh, and the cover, a painting by Tom Hammick, is beautiful and perfectly, unintentionally, illustrative of the title.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews