Bøger af Bill Buford

The year 1989, annus mirabilis, was the most important year in Europe since the end of World War Two. After 1989, Europe changed irreversibly, for better or worse. This special issue of Granta focuses on this crucial moment and projects itself into the possible future outcomes.

In the second issue of Granta is a novella by George Steiner, short stories by John Barth, Robert Coover, Walter Abish and others, along with essays on contemporary fiction and poetry.

Ian Hamilton is a poet and biographer. He is also a Tottenham Hotspur supporter - and a Gazza fan. This collection includes his account of the story of Gazza: at play, on show, in the press, in pain, in distress - of Gazza more sinned against than sinning. Also in this issue: Jonathan Raban: On Flooded Mississippi; Ethan Canin: J.D. Salinger's Heir Apparent?; Nick Hornby: On Teenage Sex; Timothy Garton Ash: With Erich Hoenecker; Michael Ignatieff: On The Era of the Warlord; and Marking the 75th Anniversary of Armistice Day, Steve Pyke's chilling World War I portraits.

A story becomes a story once it has an ending, and there is no ending more powerful than death. But what of death itself? Here, fourteen writers and photographers set out to look at it: John Gregory Dunne, Adam Mars-Jones, Mary McCarthy, Edmund White, Louise Erdrich, Michael Ignatieff, John Treherne, and eerie death faces by photographer Rudolph Schäfer.

Martin Amis's tale of Nicola Six, a girl who's been trouble all her life. Plus: 'Gibraltar', Ian Jack's award-winning investigation into the Death on the Rock, Raymond Carver, Tess Gallagher, Todd McEwen, John Berger, Angela Carter, and Don DeLillo.

For the last thirty or forty years, it has been a commonplace that science and literature don't mix. But recently science writing has undergone a revival and has come to constitute a literature in itself. What accounts for its sudden appeal? The attraction of facts? Or the possibility that 'facts' are themselves inventions of the most spectacular kind?This issue is devoted to representing part of this revival. In 'Excesses', Oliver Sacks describes individuals suffering from not only too much personality but too many. In 'Amazon', Eugene Richards and Dorothea Lynch document the terrible mystery of illness and the body. The sexuality of tortoises, the lunacy of invention, the bizarre mating habits of a tropical rodent, the zoo-like existence of the young scientists of Reagan's Star Wars - all invite us to understand 'science' not simply as the study of fact but also as another way, not unlike the novel, of describing the mystery of the world.

From Nobel laureates to debut novelists, international translations to investigative journalism, each issue of Granta turns the attention of the world's best writers on to one aspect of the way we live now.

'I find myself in 1985 refreshing my memory of 1937 and 1938 in an old commonplace book and very fragmentary diary. There are verses copied there which I must have chosen for their significance at these moments of my life: literary gossip, bizarre crimes and divorces wrenched from newspapers...and then suddenly the digging of trenches on Clapham Common.' Plus Alice Munro, John Updike, Doris Lessing, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Marianne Wiggins.

The Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, China, Cuba...what has happened to the nineteenth-century dream of revolution? John Berger, Milan Kundera, Orville Schell, Anita Brookner, James Fenton, Doris Lessing, Martin Amis, and Edward Said.

The author was asked by the New Yorker to write a profile of Mario Batali who runs one of New York's most successful three-star restaurants. Buford accepted the commission, on the condition Batali allow him to work in his kitchen, as his slave. This memoir presents his kitchen adventures, and the story of Batali's rise to culinary fame.