Editor’s Letter

In 1979, when Bill Buford introduced his first issue of Granta, a penetrating, bravura survey of American fiction, he proclaimed his efforts to be ‘a kind of energetic failure’. Thirty years later, I know what he means. Gathering together a magazine of new writing requires a certain amount of energy, although of an almost entirely pleasurable kind; sifting through short stories and novels-in-progress to provide an entertaining and illuminating sample of today’s literary landscape is hardly work, by most people’s standards. The prospect of failure is a different matter. But failure to do what?