Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists

The Granta catch up continues with a "best of young American novelists" issue. High quality as always with Granta. It was interesting to note than an enormous number of the best young American novelists are not natives of the US. That doesn't change the quality of the writing, of course, but it is interesting.

The pieces range from interesting excerpts from novels to true short stories and some interesting character sketches. It's unfortunate that they are arranged alphabetically by author; the tone kind of lurches around, and the issue ends of one of the weaker pieces. But still, good reading, what you'd expect from Granta.

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Granta 98: The Deep End

I love Granta, the British quarterly of new writing. I have an enormous stack to catch up on, and am working backward. This issue focuses on "people, whose experience of life suggests they have something to tell us about survival." Lots of good stuff, though I particularly enjoyed Jackie Kay's "The Last of the Smokers" and "Agammemnon's Truth" by Javier Cercas.

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Leaving Reality Behind by Adam Wishart and Regula Bochser

I don't think this book got much attention when it was published... and it's been sitting on my shelf to be read for a couple of years. I'm glad I finally got to it - it's a fantastic look at the dot com craziness of the late 90s. It tells the story of the rapid rise and fall of eToys, the people who were going to turn toy retailing on its head (paging Amazon... paging Amazon...) and etoy, a group of European artists who were satirizing corporate ideas, and the rather nasty domain fight that broke out between them.

But what's really fascinating about it is the look at the insanity of that whole period, how people got all kinds of money with no hope of ever using it to make more, and battles over how commercial and community interests would coexist online.

Good reading.

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