Granta Goes on Holiday

It’s summer and time to revisit Granta’s holiday highlights. So: fix yourself a fruity, frothy drink with a tiny umbrella in it, pull up a deck chair and travel the world with Granta.

Granta 94: Tia Wallman spends her school holidays in the middle of the Vietnam war.

Granta 84 Edmund White meets his first Europeans.

Granta 91 John Borneman vacations with the tsunami in Sri Lanka.

Granta 88 Richard Beard explores a universal conflict on a beach in France.

Granta 94 Mark Haworth-Booth reads the local papers on holiday in Bay Harbor, Maine.

Fiction

Granta 100 ‘Highlights’ by Alan Hollinghurst

They were at Gatwick, Colin and Archie, waiting to check in, and Colin refusing to think about whether it was a good idea. Already Archie was talking to the young Italian ahead of them in the queue... asking him something about a discoteca. Oh, God, thought Colin. Surely we’re not going to Rome for discos. Though with a tiny part of himself he thought it might be rather thrilling to come back having gone to one.

Granta 84 ‘Farangs’ by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

Ma says, ‘Pussy and elephants. That’s all these people want.’ She always says this in August, at the season’s peak, when she’s tired of farangs running all over the Island, tired of finding used condoms in the motel’s rooms, tired of guests complaining to her in five languages. She turns to me and says, ‘You give them history, temples, pagodas, traditional dance, floating markets, seafood curry, tapioca desserts, silk-weaving cooperatives, but all they really want is to ride some hulking grey beast like a bunch of wildmen and to pant over girls and to lie there half-dead getting skin cancer on the beach during the time inbetween.’