Looking back on sex

As we prepare the jumbo PDF of our next issue for its journey to the printer in Italy, we take a wistful glance over our shoulders. It’s something of a turning-point: shifting our focus away from ‘Sex’ (we all need that sometimes). It will be on newsstands and in bookshops for another month, of course – and available ever more, all issues of Granta being in print. But take a break we must – just not without another languorous gaze at that notorious purse and its contents...

No one finds writing about sex easy – but our contributors attacked the challenge with gusto. So did our readers: we published a winner and three runners-up in our competition to tell an erotic story in eleven sentences. (This was inspired by an anecdote of Rupert Thomson’s, whose short piece of memoir ‘Park Life’ is also online.)

In our first web exclusive, Evie Wyld remembered the book ‘Woman’s Body: An Owner’s Manual’ – given to her by her mother. We published some excerpts from The Pretty Women of Paris, an eighteenth-century directory of the city’s courtesans for the visiting English gentleman (see Georgina and Berthe, right). Janice Galloway remembered her sex education: curtain pelmets and physics lessons at Ardrossan Academy, and Jo McMillan had a lesson of a different sort when she visited a sex shop in Beijing. A plastic surgeon told Kapka Kassabova that she was perfect, in an attempt to seduce her – in ‘Lunch with the Surgeon’, she discussed why this is not a compliment.

From the print issue, we had memoir by James Lord, along with tales of a holiday that Patrick Ryan shared with him, and an introduction to his life by Ted Hodgkinson.

The artistic side had its own delights to offer. We launched thisisnotapurse.com, an exclusive website with three short films, inspired by writing from the issue by Roberto Bolaño and Mark Doty, and drawings by Dave Eggers. On photography, we had A. M. Homes’s response to ‘Empty Porn Sets’, Jo Broughton’s photo essay from the issue. Broughton also spoke to Ollie Brock about how she came to be living in a porn studio. Yann Faucher, our other featured photographer, told Emily Greenhouse about his work, and the wild hippie summers of his childhood.

Also from the print issue, we had Brian Chikwava’s essay ‘The Fig Tree and the Wasp’, in which he remembered the dance iskokotcha and the groundswell that it caused in 1970s Zimbabwe. Playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz told of an unexpected encounter on a Greyhound bus in ‘Roseland’; and Victor Lavalle recorded his essay ‘Long Distance’ – on having sex in a new body.

There’s much more, of course, in the printed edition, which you can buy online or subscribe to – including fiction by Tom McCarthy, Herta Müller, Jeanette Winterson and Roberto Bolaño. But neither the paperback nor the website are going anywhere soon. Next online is a fortnight dedicated to music, starting on 14 June – featuring an exclusive extract of biographer Colin Grant’s forthcoming book I&I, the Natural Mystics: Marley, Tosh and Livingston – as well as other new writing and pieces from our archive. Check our homepage for updates – or click here to subscribe to all our posts.