Granta 84: Over There
The USA is the world’s newest, greatest and only empire. And, some would say, the world’s most insular state as well as the most powerful, never troubling to correct its ignorance of the people and places beyond its borders.
Is it a slander? In this issue of Granta, American writers describe their encounters abroad and how they were affected by them, while, in reportage and fiction, outsiders to America come upon the strangeness of the place itself.
In this issue
James Buchan: This is Centerville
Martin Rowson: Mapping America
James Kelman: Man Walks into a Bar
Anthony Suau: The Home Front
Judith Hermann: Nothing But Ghosts
Rattawut Lapcharoensap: Farangs
Luc Sante: God’s Country
Edmund White: My First European
Julian Barnes: Knowing French
Plus: Recollections and Forecasts From Twenty Writers
Tom Bissell, Gardner Botsford, Paula Fox, Nell Freudenberger, Paul Fussell, Charles Glass, Chris Hedges, Adam Hochschild, A. M. Homes, Chalmers Jonhson, Murad Kalam, J. Robert Lennon, Jacki Lyden, Todd McEwan, Darryl Pinckney, Eric Schlosser, Gary Shteyngart, Studs Terkel, Paul Theroux and Joel Turnipseed.
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Farangs
Fiction
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My First European
The writer meets his first Europeans
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Over There
The author makes a mistake in Laos and learns that ‘ignorance is no excuse’
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Over There
The author warns against the danger of thinking that the ‘rest of the world’ is one place
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Over There
The author on war in an age of twenty-four hour television
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Over There
The author on what he values about American society
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Over There
The author on the far-reaching influence of Babar the elephant
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Over There
‘I set off for Egypt convinced that, unlike America, there was no corruption and hypocrisy in the Arab Muslim world and that it bore no responsibility for its own appalling condition’
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Over There
‘The world is like…’ Like what, exactly? The author can’t decide
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Over There
The author on the new imperialism
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Over There
‘I am still less despised in America than elsewhere’
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Over There
The author on his four days as a sexual prisoner in Africa