"Granta" issues are usually themed, but this 10-year birthday edition is a miscellany of writing from authors all over the globe, and includes fiction, non-fiction, and photography. There are 22 pieces here and the writing in general is dense with very little humor, although there are exceptions. Only a handful stand out as exceptional to me.
The opening article is an amazing and truly frightening eye-witness account of the Tiananmen Square Massacre by John Simpson, a British journalist who was covering the peaceful protests of the students. It documents in ghastly detail the brutality of the mob and the degree to which totalitarian governments will respond to an internal threat. Still today, this same threat overshadows any protest by citizens of Hong Kong and Taiwan.
William Boyd's story, "Transfigured Night", set in Austria in WWI is great in recreating a long-past world and time. The narrator is real-life philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who apparently had a very interesting life.
"In The Man with the Dagger" Russell Hoban uses Borges' short story "The South" as a jumping off point to a town populated by living skeletons, noir movie tropes, and a man looking for a conclusion. Very Day of the Dead, and very fun.
The best story for me far and away was Joy Williams' "Little Winter". A woman dying from a brain tumor visits an old friend, sort of kidnaps her friend's precocious daughter, steals a dog, and heads off on a road trip. I enjoyed the trip.
There's also writing by literary heavyweights Salman Rushdie (in hiding from the Ayatollah's assassination order), Nadine Gortimer, Jeanette Winterson, Jay McInerney, John Updike, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Frankly, there's a lot of sauce to spoon through to uncover the meat. ( )