The Best of Granta Reportage

by Bill Buford (Editor)

Since its relaunch in 1979, Granta has championed the art and craft of reportage—journalism marked by vivid description, a novelist's eye to form, and eyewitness reporting that reveals hidden truths about people and events that have shaped the world we know. Featuring distinguished writers and reporters such as James Fenton, Martha Gellhorn, Germaine Greer, Ryszard Kapuscinski, John le Carré, Marilynne Robinson, and John Simpson, as well as new talents Elana Lappin, Suketu Mehta, and Wendell Steavenson, the book covers some of the signal events of our time, including the fall of Saigon, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the massacre in Tiananmen Square, and the aftermath of the American invasion of Iraq.

432 pages, Paperback

First published March 25, 1993

About the author

William Holmes Buford is an American author and journalist. He is the author of the books Among the Thugs and Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. Buford was previously the fiction editor for The New Yorker, where he is still on staff. For sixteen years, he was the editor of Granta, which he relaunched in 1979. He is also credited with coining the term "dirty realism".

Reviews

[Chris Tyburski]

A fantastic collection of literary nonfiction. The works reveal stories of real-life suffering, brutality, and humanity in a way only literary prose can.

All of the reportage takes place in the latter half of the twentieth century, across multiple continents, but each author manages to weave together thematic threads which are still resonant today.

“Gibraltar” identifies the perils of using military forces for domestic law enforcement. It asks us how we define terms like “terrorist” and “arrest.”

Martha Gellhorn’s dispatch from U.S. controlled Panama calls to mind recent intervention in Venezuela.

“Boys in Zinc” effectively juxtaposes the human tragedy of today’s Russian invasion of Ukraine with the 1990’s Russian invasion of Afghanistan.

Each piece, either directly or indirectly, asks the reader to question what we know, what we are told, and what we consider to be the truth.

“The Best of Granta Reportage” is exactly that, a shining example of the heights literary nonfiction can reach.