Granta - The Magazine of New Writing 143, Spring 2018 [antikvár]

Introduction couldn't make it up', people keep saying, watching news X bulletins flash across screens. The political world seems to be turning into fiction, with unexpectedly dramatic and bewildering plots and subplots. By contrast, in this issue of Granta we try to disentangle theatre and politics, and remember that acts have consequences, and that those consequences, while not always predictable, are rarely surprising. In 'Days of Awe', A.M. Homes considers questions of desire and authorial legitimacy with her trademark humour and insight - her main protagonist has written a novel about the multi-generational effects of Holocaust trauma, and is attending a conference on genocide. The delicate question of who owns the story of the Shoah is woven into satire. Homes is so good on popular culmre, ranging from conference questions to corporate sponsorship (sometimes getting happy should be simple reads the slogan on a chocolate bar wrapper advertising antidepressants). Gerda Hoff, an elderly Holocaust survivor, confronts the nameless novelist. 'You want to know what I like?' she says. 'Chocolate ice cream. That's something to live for. Your book, a shaynem dank dir im pupik. I lived it, I don't have to read it.' A shaynem dank dir im pupik.Yiddi^h. for 'many thanks to your belly button', or: thanks for nothing. Joshua Cohen's surreal story 'Mall Camp, Seasons 1 & 2' shows a Syrian boy mapping his lost culmral logic onto the crumbling colour-coded edifice of his new world; a closed refugee camp located in an unfinished shopping mall in Greece. This too is a story about the aftermath of violence, but in this case the trauma is so recent that its discourse and even its language is as yet unformed. In this issue we are publishing Malaysian-Chinese author Ho Sok Fong for the first time in English. Her short story is about teaching in the context of censorship and conservative Islamic forces. Staff at the school are let go for slight indiscretions or infringements of the