Ian Jack

A powerful curiosity is the hallmark of new kind of Indian writing: important questions about the country's past and present have found their expression in different forms of non-fiction story-telling that twenty years ago tended to be preserve of richer societies in the west. Biography, memoir, narrative history, reportage, the travel account: all these forms now have their interesting and original practitioners in India. In this Granta issue they tackle questions ranging from rape in the paddy fields of Bengal to the end of the Delhi intelligentsia. And there is room, as always, for the best of India's fiction.

In this selection from over twenty years of reporting and writing, Ian Jack sets out to deal with contemporary Britain - from national disasters to football matches to obesity - but is always drawn back in time, vexed by the question of what came first. In 'Women and Children First', watching the film Titanic leads into an investigation into the legend of Wallace Henry Hartley, the famous band leader of the doomed liner, while 'The 12.10 to Leeds', a magnificent report on the Hatfield rail crash, begins its hunt for clues in the eighteenth century in the search for those responsible. Further afield, he finds vestiges of a vanished Britain in the Indian subcontinent, meeting characters like maverick English missionary and linguist William Carey, credited with importing India's first steam engine. Full of the style, knowledge and intimacy that makes his work so special, this collection is the perfect introduction to the work of one of the country's finest writers.

This issue of Granta is by people, and about people, whose experience of life suggests they have something to tell us about survival.

This issue features new work by the twenty writers that Granta's judges - including novelists Edmund White and A. M. Homes - have selected as the most interesting new young voices in American fiction. Granta began its influential "Best of Young..." series with British novelists in 1983, repeated in 1993 and 2003. In 1996, Granta's first "Best of Young American Novelists" included Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen and Lorrie Moore. Who will match them in the new generation?

This work includes dispatches from the world of conflict, in the battlefield and in the home, including: James Buchan on Iran's nuclear weapons programme; Jasmina Tesanovic on the death squads of Serbia; Hugh Raffles on cricket-fighting in Shanghai; and new fiction by Tahmima Anam and Edmund White. It also contains: Britain's hidden defence bases, and photographs by Simon Norfolk, words by Neal Ascherson.

It can be hard to love the people we should love; sometimes objects of affection are easier. This issue includes Jonathan Taylor's frank and bitterly funny account of a boyhood spent caring for a father with Parkinson's Disease ('Who are you?'), Jeremy Seabrook on the twin brother he hardly knew, and Sean Wilsey on his devotion to bicycles.

The politics of religion around the world, featuring: Nadeem Aslam, Diana Athill, Geoff Dyer, Nell Freudenberger, Simon Gray, A L Kennedy, Richard Mabey, John McGahern, Andrew Martin, Pankaj Mishra, Blake Morrison, Alison Smith, Lucretia Stewart - on their personal experiences - close, baffling, acrimonious or non-existent - of the divine An interview with Orhan Pamuk; Wendell Steavenson in Iraq;Andrew Brown among in Sweden;Jackie Kay on meeting her father for the first time;John Borneman on fathers and sons in Syria; Kees Beekmans in the 'black schools' of Amsterdam. Plus new fiction by Gary Shteyngart, Karen Russell and Kamran Nazeer. And a photo-essay by David Graham: Acts of God.

This issue of "Granta reveals what the Africans themselves think about their continent with its diverse cultures and classes among its many nations. "Granta 92 includes new writing from such literary superstars as J. M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, Emmanuel Dongala, and Tahar Ben Jelloun. It also includes a nonfiction piece by Daniel Bergner about a former LAPD policeman who now works for the United Nations training police in war-torn Liberia.

LAST GASPS Thoughts about Alan while waiting for Harold, by Simon Gray The author of the celebrated and widely-acclaimed The Smoking Diaries returns to print with a tender, affecting, and of course funny account of his friendship with Alan Bates, written as he waits in Barbados for Harold Pinter to turn up. PLUS: Said Sayrafiezadeh on the perils of having a socialist for a father Simon Garfield on his obsession with faulty postage stamps Wayne McLennan on the Australian outback's last boxing nomads. And Margaret Atwood, James Hamilton-Paterson, James Lasdun, Orhan Pamuk, Maarten 't Hart and Tim Winton on our changing weather. With new fiction by Frederic Tuten and Gllad Evron.

Country Life: how it is lived, how it has changed, and how the changes are far from over. An issue that ranges from English fox-hunters to the rice-planters of the Ganges delta. Featuring Tim Adams goes on a fox hunt, Craig Taylor returns to Akenfield thirty-five years after Ronald Blythe's landmark book, and Jeff Sharlet finds out what's eating rural Coloradans. Plus Margaret Atwood, James Hamilton-Paterson, Barry Lopez, Orhan Pamuk and Tim Winton on the weather.

Britain invented the factory - Manchester was the world's first factory city. Where are they now? The anser, mainly, is China. An issue devoted to how and where we made and make things, from strawberries in the fields of Herefordshire to the car plants of Korea.

Edmund White on Delilah Mae White: 'What made her uncertain were the proper boundaries between children and adults, love and sex, work and play. What bewildered her were her own children.' John McGahern on Susan McGahern: 'My mother spoke to me of heaven as concretely and with as much love as she named the wild flowers. It was her prayer and fervent hope that we would all live there together in happiness with God for all eternity.' Major writers talk about the influence of mothers in this book.

A celebration of Granta's first quarter century with new writing from the writers who made its reputation, including Martin Amis, Paul Auster, William Boyd, Amit Chaudhul, Richard Ford, James Hamilton-Paterson, Jan Morris, Blake Morrison, Jayne Anne Phillips, Paul Theroux and Edmund White.

Granta goes to the movies. Featuring John Fowles on the making of 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' and DM Thomas on the not-making of 'The White Hotel', Nik Cohn on his early involvement with the porn industry, Thomas Keneally on finding Schindler's list, Roger Lewis on Peter Sellers, Gaby Wood on Lana Turner, Pankaj Mishra in Bombay, Ian Jack on the Roxy, the Rialto, the Ritz and the Regal, Andrew O'Hagan on two years in the dark as a movie critic and Maarten 'T Hart on coping with Werner Herzog and his ten thousand rats. Plus Art by film directors: The drawings, storyboards and photographs of Cocteau, Fellini, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Scorsese and many more... And new fiction by Tessa Hadley and Jim Lewis and John Boorman.

Repressed personal experiences, neglected battles, forgotten civilizations: an issue of Granta that excavates the unfairly buried event, the secret life, the overlooked war. With Diana Athill on losing her baby, Giles Foden on the origins of 'The African Queen', Jennie Erdal on being a ghostwriter, Brian Cathcart on the very different life of another Brian Cathcart, Donovan Wylie's photographs of a northern Irish past, Geoffrey Beattie on growing up in Belfast, plus new fiction by Anne Enright.

Granta magazine's 71st issue, "What We Think of America", published in April 2002, was a prescient reflection of the USA's deepening political unpopularity among people outside its own borders. But what do Americans themselves think of their country's new imperialism - and of the world it rules? Do they know? Do they care? Reportage, fiction, opinion from outsiders in America, and Americans on themselves.

Not so much the state we're in as the mess we're getting into. The world we were born into has gone. We shall never completely recapture its climate, its seasons, the way its plants grew and its animals lived. This is not a wild-eyed prediction, a man on the street with a placard. Respectable science knows it and says it. Nine of the world's ten warmest years since records were kept have occurred in the past fourteen years. Every month, an English garden moves south, climatically, by a distance of one hundred yards. Who is responsible? We are our habits. Can we prevent it? Too late. Can we moderate it, slow it, reverse it? Yes- if we try. This issue of "Granta" contains reports from the frontiers of environment change. Contributors include: Marion Botsford-Fraser; James Hamilton-Paterson; Matthew Hart; Thomas Keneally; Philip Marsden; Bill McKibben; Wayne McLennan; Christopher de Bellaigue; James Meek; and Nuha al-Radi in Iraq. There is new fiction from Maarten 't Hart and Jon McGregor, and a picture essay by Edward Burtynsky on our industrial landscapes.

Like what, exactly? Like 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:Lynn Barber on the conman who seduced her, and then her parentsKathryn Chetkovich on living with envy, bred by a partner who is more successful than she isSimon Gray on smoking, absent friends, getting old, smoking, and why Gary Cooper walked the way he didGraham Robb on how we tried to spot homosexuality, in ourselves and others. And in fiction:Nell Freudenberger: the tutor's storyJ. Robert Lennon: look what the cat brought home (sex) Jayne Anne Phillips: the Termite's birthdayand Paul MurrayPlus: 'The Steam People' , a picture essay by Robin Grierson on the glorious machines of old England, and their lovers.

Everybody has been a reluctant or willing member of one: the family, the school, the football side, the quiz team, the once-faithful friends who met in a bar every Friday at five. Group photographs are their souvenir - frozen moments of a previous way of living, and of liking or disliking the people who shared it. In this issue of Granta magazine, writers take out their group photographs and evoke the sometimes uncomfortable times, places and people they used to know. It also includes new fiction and reportage from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

An issue devoted to the dubious rewards and strange effects of fame which successfully avoids mentioning Andy Warhol.