Böcker av Ian Jack

This issue takes a wayward look at the lives of beasts. A dog prepares for the death of his master; a movie-going tarantula has a crush on Nicole Kidman; and a raven learns to speak Spanish. Photography of China's new young women and the streets of New York also features.

"Recommended for anyone with even a passing interest in humanity." -- British Journal of General Practice. This issue of Granta is dedicated to love, or more often the lack of it, the loss of it, and the search for it. It includes stories about sibling rivalry, about rediscovering parental love, and about the end of marriage and enduring friendship.

How do you cope with the great, if you yourself are not so great? Do you speak, do you listen, in the face of every difficulty do you try to please? The sensible thing to do is keep a diary. Irish poet Richard Murphy remembers his experiences with Auden, J.R. Ackerley and Theodore Roethke.

Some travel is vital to the traveller. Sometimes you need to get home or get away. Sometimes this is far from easy. This issue of Granta contains compelling stories about journeys which need to be made. You might call it necessary travel writing.

There was always the - is this it? - issue. It made him think of his father again. His father had been a New Yorker and had New Yorker ways. His father always felt there should be more, more for Henry and his brothers. More than they had. To accept, to not overreach, was to accept defeat.

This issue reflects a variety of the extreme individual experience provided by the 20th century. James Hamilton-Paterson recounts his rape by five men in Libya; Marlon Brando reveals the stupidities of celebrity to Studs Terkel; and Andrew Brown describes the death of God in the Church of England.

In 1966, the South African premier, Hendrik Verwoerd was stabbed to death in the South African parliament. Who was the killer and what was his motives? A political enemy of the system? A madman?

This issue examines the experience from the patient's couch and the psychiatrist's chair, in both fiction and non-fiction. The contributors include Elliot Perlman, Patrick McGrath, Edmund White and Ved Mehta.

This issue on Russia explores how an old country is finding new ways to think and write. As well as fiction by Russian writers, there is a report on a visit to the once unvisitable Siberia, interviews with the survivors of Stalin's gulag, and a discussion of the place of vodka in Russian culture.

In this edition of the Granta magazine, Richard Lloyd Parry reports on the savage civil war taking place in Indonesia and Nicholas Shakespeare writes on Martha Gelhorn and why she hated her husband, Ernest Hemingway.

In this issue of Granta Magazine, the theme is the sea and our relationship with it. It includes pieces by: James Hamilton-Paterson, on a lonely death in the Pacific; Julia Blackburn, on the lure of the mermaid; Neal Ascherson, on the death of the Black Sea; and Haruki Murakami.

In this selection from over twenty years of reporting and writing, Ian Jack sets out to deal with contemporary Britain - from national disasters to football matches to obesity - but is always drawn back in time, vexed by the question of what came first.

In this fascinating and illuminating book Ian Jack has chosen six major poets - Dryden, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, and Yeats - and has traced the career of each to discover the nature and the extent of their readers' influence on their poetry.

Contains dispatches from the world of conflict, in the battlefield and in the home, including: James Buchan on Iran's nuclear weapons programme; Jasmina Tesanovic on the death squads of Serbia; Hugh Raffles on cricket-fighting in Shanghai; and fiction by Tahmima Anam and Edmund White.

In this issue, writers from across the world describe how America has affected them - culturally, politically, economically, as citizens, as writers, as children and as adults, for better or worse.

Looks at the nature of love: it can be hard to love the people we should love; sometimes objects of affection are easier. This issue includes an account of a boyhood spent caring for a father with Parkinson's Disease ('Who are you?'), Jeremy Seabrook on the twin brother he hardly knew, and Sean Wilsey on his devotion to bicycles.

A new edition of The Granta Book of Reportage featuring distinguished writers and reporters - John Simpson, James Fenton, Martha Gellhorn, Germaine Greer, Ryszard Kapuscinski - this book covers some of the signal events of our time.

Not so much the state we're in as the mess we're getting into. Reports and stories from the frontiers of climate change and environmental (and human) catastrophe.

Repressed personal experiences, neglected battles, forgotten civilisations: an issue of Granta that excavates the unfairly buried event, the secret life, the overlooked.

Contains writing from people whose experience of life suggests they have something to tell us about survival.

Features the work by the twenty writers that Granta's judges - including novelists Edmund White and AM Homes - have selected as the most interesting young voices in American fiction.

The politics of religion around the world

The author of the celebrated and widely-acclaimed The Smoking Diaries, returns to print, with a tender, affecting, and of course funny account of his friendship with Alan Bates, written as he waits in Barbados for Harold Pinter to turn up.

Country Life: how it is lived, how it has changed, and how the changes are far from over. An issue that ranges from English fox- hunters to the rice-planters of the Ganges delta.

Britain invented the factory - Manchester was the world's first factory city. Where are they now? The anser, mainly, is China. An issue devoted to how and where we made and make things, from strawberries in the fields of Herefordshire to the car plants of Korea.

Collection & anthologies of various literacy from John MCGahern on his mother's struggle for health & happiness in Catholic Ireland, Alexander Fuller on bearing a child in Africa, Ryszard Kapuscinski on his memories of the Second World War plus writings from Edmund White, Paul Theroux, Jim Lewis and others.

A celebration of Granta's first quarter century with new writing from the writers who made its reputation, including Martin Amis, Paul Auster, William Boyd, Amit Chaudhul, Richard Ford, James Hamilton-Paterson, Jan Morris, Blake Morrison, Jayne Anne Phillips, Paul Theroux and Edmund White.

Granta magazine's 71st issue, "What We Think of America", was a prescient reflection of the USA's deepening political unpopularity among people outside its own borders. But what do Americans themselves think of their country's new imperialism - and of the world it rules?