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← Back to all issuesGranta 8: Dirty Realism
Summer 1983
The issue of Granta that defined a new school of American writers: Richard Ford, Jayne Anne Phillips, Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Tallent, Tobias Wolff, Bobbie Ann Mason, Frederic Barthelme, Carolyn Forché and others.
From this Issue
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The State of The State of Things
Michael Herr
‘It's appropriate to a film that is so much about film to pay tribute to the mythical incubator of the medium.’
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Fragments of a Lament for Thelonious Monk
Russell Hoban
‘Always the slant rhyme with Thelonious, that was his Thelonious assault on the grey and civil devils of the ordinary. Walk tall and slanty, Thelonious; you live.’
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War Reports from Poland
Marek Nowakowski
‘The familiar scenes floated by. Life renewing itself, the same from year to year.’
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Claudia Cardinale is a Mexican Revolutionary
Duncan Bush
‘What average viewer, you ask? Who knows. Male, Caucasian, as they say.’
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Rock Springs
Richard Ford
‘But as I read on a napkin once, between the idea and the act a whole kingdom lies. And I had a hard time with my acts, which were oftentimes offender's acts.’
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Why I Love Country Music
Elizabeth Tallent
‘The harmonica player is left standing alone in the light, talking to himself. He cleans the spit from his instrument with a white handkerchief so old it is nearly transparent.’
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Monster Deal
Frederick Barthelme
‘I'm about ready to go see what’s happening when they come in, each of them carrying a flamingo from the front yard.’
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Still Life With Watermelon
Bobbie Ann Mason
‘When she saw a photograph of a cornucopia in a magazine, she imagined a huge watermelon stuck in its mouth.’
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Moscow Women
Carola Hansson & Karin Lidén
‘She’s young, then suddenly she’s old, and she’s buried without knowing why she ever lived.’
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El Salvador: An Aide-Mémoire
Carolyn Forché
‘It is my feeling that the twentieth-century human condition demands a poetry of witness.’
