Granta 82: Life’s Like That

Like what exactly? Always ready to surprise you on the stairs, like wishing you had only known; like wanting it to go on for rather longer. This issue of Granta contains lessons drawn from the muddle of experience. With Simon Gray on smoking, absent friends, getting old and why Gary Cooper walked the way he did; Lynn Barber on the conman who seduced her, and then her parents; Kathryn Chetkovich on living with envy, bred by a partner who is more successful than she is; plus new fiction by Nell Freudenberger, Bill Gaston, J. Robert Lennon, Paul Murray and Jayne Anne Phillips; and Tim Judah on the last Jews of Baghdad.