Books by John Freeman
Photography: The New Complete Guide to Taking Photographs
by John Freeman
Become a better photographer with hundreds of tips for taking more creative and expressive photographs with APS, SLR and digital cameras. Sixteen easily understood sections, including Understanding Cameras and Film, Photographing People, Nature, The Urban Landscape and more, offer valuable insights for improving the quality of your photos and increasing your enjoyment of the art. From artificial lighting to texture and hue, from simplifying depth of field and the proper use of wide angle and telephoto lenses to the special challenges of photographing babies and children, every aspect of better photography becomes clear. See how selecting the right background and props can dramatically enhance the composition, and learn how weather and lighting conditions affect the final print. In addition, tips for shooting film outdoors, in arctic and desert conditions, and even underwater are all included, along with guidelines for buying lenses, using filters, and the secrets of developing and retouching.
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Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation
by John Freeman
Thirty-six major contemporary writers examine life in a deeply divided America—including Anthony Doerr, Ann Patchett, Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, Hector Tobar, Joyce Carol Oates, Edwidge Danticat, Richard Russo, Eula Bliss, Karen Russell, and many more
America is broken. You don’t need a fistful of statistics to know this. Visit any city, and evidence of our shattered social compact will present itself. From Appalachia to the Rust Belt and down to rural Texas, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest stretches to unimaginable chasms. Whether the cause of this inequality is systemic injustice, the entrenchment of racism in our culture, the long war on drugs, or immigration policies, it endangers not only the American Dream but our very lives.
In Tales of Two Americas, some of the literary world’s most exciting writers look beyond numbers and wages to convey what it feels like to live in this divided nation. Their extraordinarily powerful stories, essays, and poems demonstrate how boundaries break down when experiences are shared, and that in sharing our stories we can help to alleviate a suffering that touches so many people.
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Tales of Two Cities: Stories of Inequality in a Divided New York
by John Freeman
Thirty major contemporary writers examine life in a deeply divided New York
In a city where the top one percent earns more than a half-million dollars per year while twenty-five thousand children are homeless, public discourse about our entrenched and worsening wealth gap has never been more sorely needed. This remarkable anthology is the literary world’s response, with leading lights including Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, and Lydia Davis bearing witness to the experience of ordinary New Yorkers in extraordinarily unequal circumstances. Through fiction and reportage, these writers convey the indignities and heartbreak, the callousness and solidarities, of living side by side with people of starkly different means. They shed light on the subterranean lives of homeless people who must find a bed in the city’s tunnels; the stresses that gentrification can bring to neighbors in a Brooklyn apartment block; the shenanigans of seriously alienated night-shift paralegals; the trials of a housing defendant standing up for tenants’ rights; and the humanity that survives in the midst of a deeply divided city. Tales of Two Cities is a brilliant, moving, and ultimately galvanizing clarion call for a city—and a nation—in crisis.
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Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World
by John Freeman
Building from his acclaimed anthology Tales of Two Americas, beloved writer and editor John Freeman draws together a group of our greatest writers from around the world to help us see how the environmental crisis is hitting some of the most vulnerable communities where they live.
In the past five years, John Freeman, previously editor of Granta, has launched a celebrated international literary magazine, Freeman's, and compiled two acclaimed anthologies that deal with income inequality as it is experienced. In the course of this work, one major theme came up repeatedly: Climate change is making already dire inequalities much worse, devastating further the already devastated. But the problems of climate change are not restricted to those from the less developed world.
Galvanized by his conversations with writers and activists around the world, Freeman engaged with some of today's most eloquent storytellers, many of whom hail from the places under the most acute stress--from the capital of Burundi to Bangkok, Thailand. The response has been extraordinary. Margaret Atwood conjures with a dys¬topian future in a remarkable poem. Lauren Groff whisks us to Florida; Edwidge Danticat to Haiti; Tahmima Anam to Bangladesh; Yasmine El Rashidi to Egypt, while Eka Kurniawan brings us to Indonesia, Chinelo Okparanta to Nigeria, and Anuradha Roy to the Himalayas in the wake of floods, dam building, and drought. This is a literary all-points bulletin of fiction, essays, poems, and reportage about the most important crisis of our times.
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How to Read a Novelist
by John Freeman
The novel is alive and well, thank you very much
For the last fifteen years, whenever a novel was published, John Freeman was there to greet it. As a critic for more than two hundred newspapers worldwide, the onetime president of the National Book Critics Circle, and the former editor of Granta, he has reviewed thousands of books and interviewed scores of writers. In How to Read a Novelist, which pulls together his very best profiles (many of them new or completely rewritten for this volume) of the very best novelists of our time, he shares with us what he's learned.
From such international stars as Doris Lessing, Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, and Mo Yan, to established American lions such as Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, John Updike, and David Foster Wallace, to the new guard of Edwidge Danticat, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, and more, Freeman has talked to everyone.
What emerges is an instructive and illuminating, definitive yet still idiosyncratic guide to a diverse and lively literary culture: a vision of the novel as a varied yet vital contemporary form, a portrait of the novelist as a unique and profound figure in our fragmenting global culture, and a book that will be essential reading for every aspiring writer and engaged reader―a perfect companion (or gift!) for anyone who's ever curled up with a novel and wanted to know a bit more about the person who made it possible.
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Dictionary of the Undoing
by John Freeman
For John Freeman―literary critic, essayist, editor, poet, “one of the preeminent book people of our time” (Dave Eggers)―it is the rare moment when words are not enough. But in the wake of the election of 2016, words felt useless, even indulgent. Action was the only reasonable response. He took to the streets in protest, and the sense of community and collective conviction felt right. But the assaults continued―on citizens’ rights and long-held compacts, on the core principles of our culture and civilization, and on our language itself. Words seemed to be losing the meanings they once had and Freeman was compelled to return to their defense. The result is his Dictionary of the Undoing.
From A to Z, “Agitate” to “Zygote,” Freeman assembled the words that felt most essential, most potent, and began to build a case for their renewed power and authority, each word building on the last. The message that emerged was not to retreat behind books, but to emphatically engage in the public sphere, to redefine what it means to be a literary citizen.
With an afterword by Valeria Luiselli, Dictionary of the Undoing is a necessary, resounding cri de coeur in defense of language, meaning, and our ability to imagine, describe, and build a better world.
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There's a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis
by John Freeman, Tracy K. Smith
This kaleidoscopic portrait of an unprecedented time brings together some of our most treasured writers today—Edwidge Danticat, Layli Long Soldier, Monica Youn, Julia Alvarez, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor—to give voice to the unthinkable grief and hopeful possibilities born in an era of revolution and change.
“A maelstrom of grief, anger, fear and confusion, with glimmers of gratitude and hope: a comprehensive emotional document of a moment.”—New York Times Book Review
Now is an extraordinary time. Across the country, people are losing their loved ones, their livelihoods, their homes, and even their own lives to COVID-19. Despite the pandemic, countless protests erupted this summer over the recurring loss of Black lives. Reverberations of shock and outrage remain with us all. There's a Revolution Outside, My Love captures and articulates all of these roiling sentiments unleashed by a profound national reckoning.
Drawing its title from a powerful letter to her son by Kirsten West Savali, the book fans out from there, offering a rich and intimate view of the change we underwent. Composed of searing letters, essays, poems, reflections, and screeds, There's a Revolution Outside, My Love highlights the work of some of our most powerful and insightful writers who hail from across a range of backgrounds and from almost all fifty states. Among them, these writers have brought home four Pulitzers, two National Book Awards, a fistful of Whitings, and numerous citations in best American poetry, short story, and essay compilations. They are noisy with beauty, and their pieces ring louder and clearer than ever before.
Galvanizing and lyrical, this is a deeply profound anthology of writing filled with pain and beauty, warmth and intimacy. A remarkable feat of empathy, There's a Revolution Outside, My Love offers solace in a time of swirling protest, change, and violence—reminding us of the human scale of the upheaval, and providing hope for a kinder future.
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Freeman's: Family: The Best New Writing on Family (Freeman's, 2)
by John Freeman
Freeman's: Family is the second literary anthology in the series reviewers are calling bold” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) and refreshing” (Chicago Literati). Following a debut issue on the theme of Arrival,” Freeman circles a new topic whose definition is constantly challenged by the best of our writers: family.
In an essay called "Crossroads," Aminatta Forna muses on the legacy of slavery as she settles her family in Washington, DC, where she is constantly accused of cutting in line whenever she stands next to her white husband. Families are hardly stable entities, so many writers discover. Award-winning novelist Claire Vaye Watkins delivers a stunning portrait of a woman in the throes of postpartum depression. Booker Prize winner Marlon James takes the focus off absent fathers to write about his mother, who calls to sing him happy birthday every year. Even in the darkest moments, humor abounds. In Claire Messud’s home there are two four-legged tyrants; Sandra Cisneros writes about her extended family of past lovers; and Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of his uncle's return from the Soviet gulag.
With outstanding work from literary heavyweights and up-and-coming writers alike, Freeman's: Family collects the most amusing, heartbreaking, and probing stories about family life today.
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Freeman's: Arrival: The Best New Writing on Arrival (Freeman's, 1)
by John Freeman
We live today in constant motion, traveling distances rapidly, small ones daily, arriving in new states. In this inaugural edition of Freeman's, a new biannual of unpublished writing, former Granta editor and NBCC president John Freeman brings together the best new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry about that electrifying moment when we arrive.
Strange encounters abound. David Mitchell meets a ghost in Hiroshima Prefecture; Lydia Davis recounts her travels in the exotic territory of the Norwegian language; and in a Dave Eggers story, an elderly gentleman cannot remember why he brought a fork to a wedding. End points often turn out to be new beginnings. Louise Erdrich visits a Native American cemetery that celebrates the next journey, and in a Haruki Murakami story, an aging actor arrives back in his true self after performing a role, discovering he has changed, becoming a new person.
Featuring startling new fiction by Laura van den Berg, Helen Simpson, and Tahmima Anam, as well as stirring essays by Aleksandar Hemon, Barry Lopez, and Garnette Cadogan, who relearned how to walk while being black upon arriving in NYC, Freeman's announces the arrival of an essential map to the best new writing in the world.
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Freeman's: Home: The Best New Writing on Home (Freeman's, 3)
by John Freeman
The third literary anthology in the series that has been called ambitious” (O Magazine) and strikingly international” (Boston Globe), Freeman’s: Home, continues to push boundaries in diversity and scope, with stunning new pieces from emerging writers and literary luminaries alike.
As the refugee crisis continues to convulse whole swathes of the world and there are daily updates about the rise of homelessness in different parts of America, the idea and meaning of home is at the forefront of many people’s minds. Viet Thanh Nguyen harks to an earlier age of displacement with a haunting piece of fiction about the middle passage made by those fleeing Vietnam after the war. Rabih Alameddine brings us back to the present, as he leaves his mother’s Beirut apartment to connect with Syrian refugees who are building a semblance of normalcy, and even beauty, in the face of so much loss. Home can be a complicated place to claim, because of race—the everyday reality of which Danez Smith explores in a poem about a chance encounter at a bus stop—or because of other types of fraught history. In Vacationland,” Kerri Arsenault returns to her birthplace of Mexico, Maine, a paper mill boomtown turned ghost town, while Xiaolu Guo reflects on her childhood in a remote Chinese fishing village with grandparents who married across a cultural divide. Many readers and writers turn to literature to find a home: Leila Aboulela tells a story of obsession with a favorite author.
Also including Thom Jones, Emily Raboteau, Rawi Hage, Barry Lopez, Herta Müller, Amira Hass, and more—writers from around the world lend their voices to the theme and what it means to build, leave, return to, lose, and love a home.
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Freeman's: The Future of New Writing (Freeman's, 4)
by John Freeman
“The oldest is 70. The youngest, 26. In between, the best list of this kind I have ever seen.”―Marlon James
In three issues, the literary anthology from leading editor John Freeman has gained an international following and wide acclaim: "fresh, provocative, engrossing" (BBC.com), "impressively diverse" (O Magazine), "bold, searching" (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). Freeman's: The Future of New Writing departs from the series' progression of themes. This special fourth installment instead introduces a list―to be announced just before publication―of more than twenty-five poets, essayists, novelists, and short story writers from around the world who are shaping the literary conversation right now and will continue to impact it in years to come.
Drawing on recommendations from book editors, critics, translators, and authors from across the globe, Freeman's: The Future of New Writing includes pieces from a select list of writers aged 25 to 70, from nearly twenty countries, and writing in almost as many languages. This will be a new kind of list, and an aesthetic manifesto for our times. Against a climate of nationalism and silo'd thinking, writers remain influenced by work from outside their region, genre, and especially age group. Serious readers, this special issue celebrates, have always read this way too―and Freeman's: The Future of New Writing brings them an exciting view of where writing is going next.
Freeman’s now has partners around the world, in the UK (Grove Press UK), Australia (Text Publishing), Sweden (Bokförlaget Polaris), Italy (Edizioni Black Coffee), and Romania (Black Button), and China (Archipel Press)
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Freeman's: Power (Freeman's, 5)
by John Freeman
From the voices of protestors to the encroachment of a new fascism, everywhere we look power is revealed. Spouse to spouse, soldier to citizen, looker to gazed upon, power is never static: it is either demonstrated or deployed. Its hoarding is itself a demonstration. This thought-provoking issue of the acclaimed literary annual Freeman’s explores who gets to say what matters in a time of social upheaval.
Many of the writers are women. Margaret Atwood posits it is time to update the gender of werewolf narratives. Aminatta Forna shatters the silences which supposedly ensured her safety as a woman of color walking in public space. Power must often be seized. The narrator of Lan Samantha Chang’s short story finally wrenches control of the family’s finances from her husband only to make a fatal mistake. Meanwhile the hero of Tahmima Anam’s story achieves freedom by selling bull semen. Australian novelist Josephine Rowe recalls a gallery attendee trying to take what was not offered when she worked as a life-drawing model. Violence often results from power imbalances―Booker Prize winner Ben Okri watches power stripped from the residents of Grenfell Tower by ferocious neglect. But not all power must wreak damage. Barry Lopez remembers fourteen glimpses of power, from the moment he hitched a ride on a cargo plan in Korea to the glare he received from a bear traveling with her cubs in the woods, asking―do you plan me harm?
Featuring work from brand new writers Nicole Im, Jaime Cortez, and Nimmi Gowrinathan, as well as from some of the world’s best storytellers, including US poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, Franco-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani, and Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, Freeman’s: Power escapes from the headlines of today and burrows into the heart of the issue.
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Freeman's: Change (Freeman's Best New Writing on)
by John Freeman
Featuring thrilling new work from Lauren Groff, Ocean Vuong, Rickey Laurentiis, and more, the latest installment of the acclaimed literary journal Freeman's explores the hope and pain of the ever-changing present
The Covid-19 pandemic forced many of us to reimagine our homes, work, relationships, and adapt to a new way of life–one with far fewer possibilities for interaction. And yet, in this period of intense isolation, we've faced dilemmas which are nearly universal. How to love, to care for aging parents, to find a home, attend to a planet in flux, fight for justice. This vast range of experiences is captured by our greatest storytellers, essayists, and poets, in the new issue of Freeman's: Change.
Some pieces explore the small moments that serve as new routines in a life lived at home, as in Joshua Bennett's essay, where a Coltrane playlist sets the stage for early morning dances with his newborn son as they watch the sun come up. Alejandro Zambra remembers the homes of his past, his dog and cat in New York, his old collection of Chilean literature, homes and possessions he lets go of when he makes a new family in Mexico.
Sometimes, it's the absence of change that drives us to the edge. In Lina Mounzer's "The Gamble," a father's incessant hope for a better life festers and sinks the whole family after they leave Lebanon during the Civil War. In Kamel Daoud's heartbreaking tale, a widow's attempt to retreat into the unchanging past edits her son right from her reality. And in "Final Days," Sayaka Murata imagines a future without aging, where people must choose how and when they want to die, consulting guidebooks like Let's Die Naturally! Super Deaths for Adults & The Best Spots.
With new writing from Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Zahia Rahmani, Yoko Ogawa, Yasmine El Rashidi, Lina Meruane, and Aleksandar Hemon, and featuring work from never-before-published writers like Elizabeth Ayre, Freeman's: Change opens a window into the many-sided ways we adapt.
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Freeman's: Love (Freeman's, 8)
by John Freeman
The latest installment from “a powerful force in the literary world” (Los Angeles Times) Freeman’s turns to one of the greatest elevating forces of life: love
In a time of contentiousness and flagrant abuse, it often feels as if our world is run on hate. Invective. Cruelty and sadism. But is it possible the greatest and most powerful force is love? In the newest issue of this acclaimed series, Freeman’s Love asks this question, bringing together literary heavyweights like Tommy Orange, Anne Carson, Louise Erdrich, and Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk alongside emerging writers such as Gunnhild Øyehaug and Semezdin Mehmedinović.
Mehmedinović contributes a breathtaking book-length essay on the aftermath of his wife’s stroke, describing how the two reassembled their lives outside their home country of Bosnia. Richard Russo’s charming and painful “Good People” introduces us to two sets of married professors who have been together for decades, and for whom love still exists, but between the wrong pair. Haruki Murakami tells the tale of a one-night stand that feels like a dying sun.
Together, the pieces comprise a stunning exploration of the complexities of love, tracing it from its earliest stirrings, to the forbidden places where it emerges against reason, to loss so deep it changes the color of perception. In a time when we need it the most, this issue promises what only love can bring: a solace of complexity and warmth.
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Freeman's: Animals (Freeman's, 11)
by John Freeman
Featuring new work from Mieko Kawakami, Martín Espada, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Arthur Sze, Camonghne Felix, and more, the latest installment of the acclaimed literary journal Freeman’s explores the irrevocably intertwined lives of animals and the humans that exist alongside them
Over a century ago, Rilke went to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where he watched a pair of flamingos. A flock of other birds screeched by, and, as he describes in a poem, the great red-pink birds sauntered on, unphased, then “stretched amazed and singly march into the imaginary.” This encounter—so strange, so typical of flamingos, with their fabulous posture—is also still typical of how we interact with animals. Even as our actions threaten their very survival, they are still symbolic, captivating and captive, caught in a drama of our framing
This issue of Freeman’s tells the story of that interaction, its costs, its tendernesses, the mythological flex of it. From lovers in a Chiara Barzini story, falling apart as a group of wild boars roams in their Roman neighborhood, to the soppen emergency birth of a cow on a Wales farm, stunningly described by Cynan Jones, no one has the moral high ground here. Nor is this a piece of mourning. There’s wonder, humor, rage, and relief, too.
Featuring pigeons, calves, stray dogs, mascots, stolen cats, and bears, to the captive, tortured animals who make up our food supply, powerfully described in Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s essay, this wide-ranging issue of Freeman’s will stimulate discussion and dreams alike.
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Freeman's: Conclusions (Freeman's, 12)
by John Freeman
Featuring new work from Rebecca Makkai, Aleksandar Hemon, Rachel Khong, Louise Erdrich, and more, the tenth and final installment of the boundary-pushing literary journal Freeman’s, which explores all the ways of coming to an end
Over the course of ten years, Freeman’s has introduced the English-speaking world to countless writers of international import and acclaim, from Olga Tokarczuk to Valeria Luiselli, while also spotlighting brilliant writers working in English, from Tommy Orange to Tess Gunty. Now, in its last issue, this unique literary project ponders all the ways of reaching a fitting conclusion.
For Sayaka Murata, keeping up with the comings and goings of fashion and its changing emotional landscapes can mean being left behind, while in her poem “Amenorrhea,” Julia Alvarez experiences the end of a line as menstruation ceases. Yet sometimes an end is merely a beginning, as Barry Lopez meditates while walking through the snowy Oregonian landscapes. While Chinelo Okparanta’s story “Fatu” confronts the end of a relationship under the specter of new life, other writers look towards aging as an opportunity for rebirth, such as Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who takes on the role of being her own elder, comforting herself in the ways that her grandmother used to. Finally, in his comic story “Everyone at Dinner Has a Max von Sydow Story,” Dave Eggers suggests that sometimes stories don’t have neat or clean endings—that sometimes the middle is enough.
With new writing from Sandra Cisneros, Colum McCann, Omar El Akkad, and Mieko Kawakami, Freeman’s: Conclusions is a testament to the startling power of literature to conclude in a state of beauty, fear, and promise.
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Freeman's: California (Freeman's, 6)
by John Freeman
From immigration rights to climate change, California has been ground zero for the most crucial questions of our time. In a bravura essay, Rabih Alamdeddine remembers bartending during the worst years of the AIDS crisis. William T. Vollmann visits the Carr fire and discovers that gas masks are the new normal. Natalie Diaz describes growing up in the desert and remaking her body on the basketball court. Award-winning journalist Lauren Markham revisits her family’s tales of their arrival in a town built by a con man on stolen land. Karen Tei Yamashita tells of a Japanese-American man going to Hiroshima after the bomb dropped, writing letters home. Reyna Grande witnesses her mother never adapting after migrating from Mexico. Tommy Orange conjures a native man so lost and broke he’s either going to rob a bank or end his life―but love might rescue him. Rachel Kushner sings a hymn to the danger and beauty of cars. And since the Beat movement, California has also given birth to an explosion of poetry. New poems by Frank Bidart, Robin Coste Lewis, D.A. Powell, and recent poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera join newcomers Mai Der Vang and Javier Zamora in this investigation and celebration of California writing. Featuring new work from Héctor Tobar and Jennifer Egan, Oscar Villalon and Anthony Marra, Geoff Dyer and Elaine Castillo, Freeman’s: California will become a benchmark for California anthologies before and to come.
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Maps
by John Freeman, Aleksandra Mizielinska, Daniel Mizielinski
Travel the world without leaving your living room.
This book of maps is a visual feast for readers of all ages, with lavishly drawn illustrations from the incomparable Mizielinskis. It features not only borders, cities, rivers, and peaks, but also places of historical and cultural interest, eminent personalities, iconic animals and plants, cultural events, and many more fascinating facts associated with every region of our planet.
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Maps
by John Freeman, Aleksandra Mizielinska, Daniel Mizielinski
John Freeman's first poetry collection charts the impact of place on human experience. In Beirut, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Rome, and the foothills of a childhood hometown, Freeman navigates legacies of ruin and construction, illness and memory. Warm, mournful, and distinctly urban, Maps offers a compassionate perspective from the experience of one American embroiled in empire.
From "You Are Here:"
The city grinds
its molars at night, carefully mined
explosions boring cavities beneath
Manhattan, while other lines
ride all hours in yellow light, gliding
to stops at the zebra-painted beam
halfway down each platform,
conductor always pointing up, as if
to say, yes, you are here.
"At the intersection of art and heart, this magnificent sheaf of voyages leads us through the di fficult and picturesque atlas of a life.... This is an enduring and rapturous account of a life’s journey to plumb the depths of the known in order to reveal the hidden and unknown." ―D.A. Powell
"What is mapped here, in John Freeman’s exquisite and robust poetry debut, are the territories of loss, pain, violence, and reckoning that make up a life. And also those of love, remembrance, and unabashed passion that make that same life livable. Maps is a consolation and a delight." ―Tracy K. Smith
"John Freeman’s astonishing book of poems shows us first an America that could once and sometimes still be experienced in a vacuum, removed from the brutal struggles that are the daily life of much of the world. Then he takes us into that world, where human tenderness is martyred and buried, day after day. In Freeman’s hands the most minimal scenes, the smallest gestures, record our persistence and fragility. Disconsolate, loving, burdened by memory, undeceived but somehow still doggedly hopeful, these poems help us to see a world we’re just beginning to map." ―Mark Doty
John Freeman is an American writer and literary critic. A graduate of Swarthmore College, Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary biannual, and author of two books of nonfiction, The Tyranny of E-mail and How to Read a Novelist. He has also edited two anthologies of writing on inequality, Tales of Two Cities and Tales of Two Americas. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York, where he teaches at The New School and is writer-in-residence at New York University. The executive editor at LitHub, he has published poems in Zyzzyva, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Nation. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
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The Park
by John Freeman
In The Park, his second book of poetry, John Freeman uses a park as a petri dish, turning a deep gaze on all that pass through it. In language both precise and restrained, Freeman explores the inherent contradictions that arise from a place whose purpose is derived purely from what we bring to it––a park is both natural and constructed, exclusionary and open, unfeeling and burdened with sentimentality. Pulling from both history and his own meditations in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, the seasons pass through famous parks, personal parks, parks beneath parks, and other spaces with fabricated outer limits. Throughout, Freeman wonders at how a park, being both curated and public, can be a nexus for a manifestation of great wealth inequality. How have we created these false boundaries for ourselves––with regard to physical space, but also in our minds and societies, in our personal relationships? Freeman plucks out difference in small daily dramas of people and animals only to dissolve it. Interspersed with meditations on love, beauty, and connection, The Park is a pacific and unflinching mirror cast upon a space defined by its transience.
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Wind, Trees
by John Freeman
A politically urgent yet timeless collection that studies the devastating failings of humanity and the redemptive possibilities of love. In Wind, Trees, John Freeman presents a meditation on power and loss, change and adaptation. What can the trees teach us about inhabiting space together? What might we gain if we admit we do not control the wind, and cannot possibly carry all we’ve been handed? Offering a stark moral critique of pandemic self-preservation—as “justifications grew / with greed like vines / up the side of a tree / taking everything”—Wind, Trees joins the ranks of politically urgent yet timeless collections like The Lice by W.S. Merwin. Through narrative lyric and metaphysical pulse, meandering thought and punctuating quiet, Freeman studies the devastating failings of humanity and the redemptive possibilities of love.
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Granta 121: Best of Young Brazilian Novelists (Magazine of New Writing, 121)
by John Freeman
Since Granta’s inaugural list of the Best of Young British Novelists in 1983 featuring Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes the Best of Young issues have been some of the magazine’s most influential and best-selling. In 2010, Granta looked beyond the English-speaking world with Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists.
Now, in an issue fully translated in partnership with Granta em Português, the magazine celebrates emerging talent from Brazil, many translated into English for the first time. Authors include Cristhiano Aguiar, Vanessa Barbara, Carol Bensimon, Javier Arancibia Contreras, J.P. Cuenca, Miguel del Castillo, Laura Erber, Emilio Fraia, Julian Fuks, Daniel Galera, Luisa Geisler, Vinicius Jatoba, Michel Laub, Tatiana Salem Levy, Ricardo Lisias, Chico Mattoso, Antonio Prata, Carola Saavendra, Leandro Sarmatz, and Antonio Xerxenesky.
Plus: look for candid interviews, exclusive podcasts, and interactive features, which allow readers to comment on current and past issues, on our website, granta.com.
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Granta 122: Betrayal
by John Freeman
In the world of the future, people exist in a perpetual state of rehearsing evacuations, and one man’s rehearsal involves leaving his parents behind.
A firespotter knows all too well that where there’s smoke, there’s fire but fails to spot the blaze that consumes half her family.
Then there’s the Custer impersonator who takes his role in a re-enactment too literally, and too far. The massage therapist who struggles to help a veteran who's biggest regret is tattooed in living detail across his back. The retired CIA operative, now a mother of two, who is still packing heat for the just-in-case scenario that has her trigger finger itching...
With award-winning reportage, memoir, fiction and photography, Granta has illuminated the most complex issues of modern life through the refractory light of literature. Feel the sting of betrayal via new writing by Ben Marcus, Janine di Giovanni, Karen Russell, Samantha Harvey, Colin Robinson, Jennifer Vanderbes, Callan Wink, John Burnside and a host of others, including debut author Lauren Wilkinson, whose heroine moves through decades with the forward lean of Richard Yates and the grace of Garcia Marquez.
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Granta 124: Travel
by John Freeman
Hari Kunzru travels to Chernobyl, Detroit, and Japan to investigate the phenomenon of disaster tourism. Policeman-turned-detective-turned-writer A Yi describes life as a provincial gumshoe in China. Physician Siddhartha Mukherjee visits a government hospital in New Delhi, where he meets Madha Sengupta, at the end of his life and on the frontiers of medicine. Robert Macfarlane explores the limestone world beneath the Peak District. And Haruki Murakami revisits his walk to Kobe in the aftermath of the 1995 earthquake.
In this issue--which includes poems by Charles Simic and Ellen Bryant Voigt, a story by Miroslav Penkov, and non-fiction by David Searcy, Teju Cole, and Hector Abad--GRANTA presents a panoramic view of our shared landscape and investigates our motivations for exploring it. One’s destination is never a place,” Henry Miller wrote, but a new way of seeing things.”
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Granta 120: Medicine (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)
by John Freeman
From the chalky horse-pills of faceless pharmaceutical conglomerates to the hot toddy that was Grandmother's remedy for bruised knees, broken hearts and everything besides, here are stories about the ways we face our ailments and the ways we seek to cure ourselves. Rose Tremain contributes an extract from Merivel, a follow-up to her award-winning Restoration; Alice Munro writes a haunting, beautiful memoir about a strange phase in her childhood; Gish Jen tells a story about two brothers who are fixing up a house . . . but can't quite fix up the ageing parents who will live in it. The issue includes new poetry by Ben Lerner, Angela Carter, James Lasdun and Kay Ryan as well as non-fiction pieces by Terrence Holt and a highly regarded writer who breaks her silence about living with MS.
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Granta 123: The Best of Young British Novelists 4 (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)
by John Freeman
Kazuo Ishiguro, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Alan Hollinghurst, David Mitchell, Salmon Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Rose Tremain, Will Self, Jeannette Winterson
long before they were household names, they were Granta Best of Young British Novelists. With each new list in 1983, 1993, and 2003 came new ways of witnessing the world, introductions to unforgettable characters and mysterious and addictive voices. In 2013, thirty years after the first collection, the magazine asks once again: Which writers are setting the bar for a new decade of British novels?
Look into Granta’s crystal ball and see the future of fiction rising up from the Big Smoke and beyond.
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Granta 107
With its mixture of investigative reportage, narrative non-fiction, photography, memoir, fiction and brilliant journalism, Granta 107 follows on from the critically-acclaimed summer reading issue to showcase more of the best new writing from around the world. In the issue, Mary Gaitskill meditates on how we measure varieties of loss after the disappearance of her rescued cat; Will Self walks through Tehran thirty years on from the revolution; and Rana Dasgupta reports from Delhi on the emergence of India’s super rich.
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Granta 116: Ten Years Later (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)
by John Freeman
Ten years later, where are we looking? How do we see things differently?
From Ground Zero to Kampala to London to Mumbai, the echoes are still heard, the impact is still felt. The way we interact, the way we travel, our relationship to media and technology, and the very way we regard the world we live in have all been irrevocably changed.
Granta 116 will examine the consequences of the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, from a global perspective. Rather than recounting where we were when it happened and what we saw, this issue will look at how our lives and viewpoints have been altered since that day.
Declan Walsh reports from the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan: breeding ground for al-Qaeda and current target of U.S. drone strikes. Elliott Woods travels across the U.S., talking to recruits, noncombatants and veterans and taking the pulse of a nation a decade at war. Pico Iyer considers what air travel is like in the post-9/11 security state; Nicole Krauss writes a melancholy, impressionistic portrait of family, war, life and death in Paris. The issue also includes fiction from newcomers Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer and Phil Klay as well as an extract of a new novel by Nuruddin Farah about a man who travels to Somalia in search of his son who has joined the jihadist movement.
Showcasing some of the most insightful essayists, fiction writers, poets and visual artists working today, Ten Years Later will explore the complexity of how we regard an event that forever shifted our conceptions of fear, anger and hope.
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Granta 117: Horror (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)
by John Freeman
It haunts us; it stalks us; it shapes us. It creeps into our dreams and, if we allow it, can plague our ponderings of the future. The same monsters’ that lived under our childhood beds can reappear, alive and toothsome, in our adult lives. And perhaps most frightening of all: without reason or apology, one person’s fancy is another person’s torment. Granta 117 takes a stab at understanding the phenomenon that is horror.
With award-winning writing, Granta has illuminated the most complex issues of modern life. In 117, Stephen King writes of a retired judge who pays repeated visits to a patch of sand capable of predicting human mortality. Don DeLillo climbs into the head a moviegoer-turned-stalker. Joy Williams writes of a father with a grown son even stranger and less stable than he suspects. Rajesh Parameswaran presents us with a tiger who narrates its own escape from a zoo and its subsequent terrorizing of a neighborhood, while Daniel Alarcon explores the phenomenon of staged, high-camp blood baths. And Mark Doty ruminates on a close encounter between Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker. Also new work by Paul Auster, Will Self, and Julie Otsuka.
Come along. Hold tight. Get scared
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Granta 114: Aliens
by John Freeman
This new issue of Granta features tales from the constantly shifting terrain of alien culture. Mark Gevisser writes of two closeted gay South African men, whose friendship has lasted five decades, dating back to a regime determined to keep black and white apart. Dinaw Mengestu writes of a war being waged in the Congo by exiles managing it from afar in France. Robert MacFarlane goes for a walk in Palestine, and meets families who can no longer return to their own homes. Nami Mun conjures a pair of spouses who feel like strangers in the wake of a terrible betrayal. Ann Patchett rediscovers the nun who taught her how to read and write -- just as her old teacher is about to live alone for the first time in her life. Paul Theroux recalls bearing witness to nineteen violent years in London. Julie Otsuka offers up a haunting tale of mail-order brides making their way from Japan to California. And we introduce Chris Dennis, a dynamic young writer who tells the tale of a young high school teacher who gets busted on a drug charge and winds up in jail with a "Rasputin-like" cellmate.
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Granta 112: Pakistan (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)
by John Freeman
Brought into nationhood under the auspices of a single religion, but wracked with deep separatist fissures and the destabilizing forces of ongoing conflicts in Iran, Afghanistan and Kashmir, Pakistan is one of the most dynamic places in the world today. It is also at the forefront of a literary renaissance.
From the writers who are living outside of the country Daniyal Muenuddin, Kamila Shamsie and Nadeem Aslam to those going back Mohsin Hamid and Mohammed Hanif to those who are living there and writing in Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Baluchi and English, like Declan Walsh, this is a startling opportunity to bring an exciting array of voices into one volume.
Granta 112: Pakistan will seize this moment, bringing to life the landscape and culture of the country in fiction, reportage, memoir, travelogue and poetry. Like the magazine's issues on India and Australia, it will be a watershed moment critically and a chance to celebrate the corona of talent which has burst onto the English-language publishing world in recent years.
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Granta 111: Going Back
by John Freeman
Richard Russo returns home to a hometown on the verge of extinction. Up-and-coming fiction writer Claire Vaye Watkins explores a damaged car on an abandoned road and a Ziploc bag of pristine letters. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shows what happens when a married man’s old flame threatens to return to Lagos. A young Iris Murdoch writes devotional letters to the older French Surrealist and Oulipo co-founder Raymond Queneau. Hal Crowther delivers a blistering critique of the Internet’s erosion of solitude.
With extracts from Mark Twain’s never-before published memoir on childhood and Colin Grant’s highly anticipated memoir Bageye at the Wheel; new poetry from Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, and Nicholas Christopher; and a photographic essay by Ian Teh.
Further works include Elizabeth McCracken's stirring tale of a young widower and the traces we leave behind; Leila Aboulela’s story of an aspiring Sudanese academic’s return to London with his young Muslim wife; foreign correspondent Janine Di Giovanni’s return to Sarajevo to search for a boy she knew fifteen years ago; Peter Orner’s examination of the question When does a place become something else?’ in Chappaquiddick; and Joseph O’Neill on the breaking of America.
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The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story
by John Freeman
A selection of the best and most representative contemporary American short fiction from 1970 to 2020, including such authors as Ursula K. LeGuin, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, and Ted Chiang, hand-selected by celebrated editor and anthologist John Freeman
In the past fifty years, the American short story has changed dramatically. New voices, forms, and mixtures of styles have brought this unique genre a thrilling burst of energy. The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story celebrates this avalanche of talent.
This rich anthology begins in 1970 and brings together a half century of powerful American short stories from all genres, including—for the first time in a collection of this scale—science fiction, horror, and fantasy, placing writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Ken Liu, and Stephen King next to some beloved greats of the literary form: Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Denis Johnson. Culling widely, John Freeman, the former editor of Granta and now editor of his own literary annual, brings forward some astonishing work to be regarded in a new light. Often overlooked tales by Dorothy Allison, Percival Everett, and Charles Johnson will recast the shape and texture of today’s enlarging atmosphere of literary dialogue. Stories by Lauren Groff and Ted Chiang raise the specter of engagement in ecocidal times. Short tales by Tobias Wolff, George Saunders, and Lydia Davis rub shoulders with near novellas by Susan Sontag and Andrew Holleran. This book will be a treasure trove for readers, writers, and teachers alike.
Copies
No copies available.
The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story
by John Freeman
A selection of the best and most representative contemporary American short fiction from 1970 to 2020, including such authors as Ursula K. LeGuin, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, and Ted Chiang, hand-selected by celebrated editor and anthologist John Freeman
In the past fifty years, the American short story has changed dramatically. New voices, forms, and mixtures of styles have brought this unique genre a thrilling burst of energy. The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story celebrates this avalanche of talent.
This rich anthology begins in 1970 and brings together a half century of powerful American short stories from all genres, including—for the first time in a collection of this scale—science fiction, horror, and fantasy, placing writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Ken Liu, and Stephen King next to some beloved greats of the literary form: Raymond Carver, Grace Paley, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Denis Johnson. Culling widely, John Freeman, the former editor of Granta and now editor of his own literary annual, brings forward some astonishing work to be regarded in a new light. Often overlooked tales by Dorothy Allison, Percival Everett, and Charles Johnson will recast the shape and texture of today’s enlarging atmosphere of literary dialogue. Stories by Lauren Groff and Ted Chiang raise the specter of engagement in ecocidal times. Short tales by Tobias Wolff, George Saunders, and Lydia Davis rub shoulders with near novellas by Susan Sontag and Andrew Holleran. This book will be a treasure trove for readers, writers, and teachers alike.
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No copies available.
Granta 119: Britain (Granta: the Magazine of New Writing, 119)
by John Freeman
A nation defined by tradition and built on expansion, Britain now has more languages spoken within its capital than any other city in the world.
Recently, Granta has explored Chicago, Pakistan and the world of Spanish-language letters. In this bold, eclectic issue, the magazine turns back to focus on Britain.
In 2012, Britain is a nation in flux, managing difficult socioeconomic realities, contending with new political alliances and negotiating shifting demographics. Yet, it is a country that is still perceived as being bound by tradition and class structures.
Is Britain still Great? Where does it stand in the New Europe? What will it become in the 21st century? The issue includes brand new novel excerpts by Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, Jim Crace, and Rachel Seiffert; essays by Robert MacFarlane, Gary Younge, and Andrew Stuart; new short stories by Mark Haddon, Adam Foulds, Tania James, Jon McGregor and Ross Raisin; and poems by Simon Armitage, Jamie McKenrick, Don Patterson, and Robin Robertson. Introducing Sam Byers.
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The Penguin Book of the International Short Story
by John Freeman, Rabih Alameddine
The best in short fiction from around the world, from celebrated anthologist and author John Freeman and award-winning novelist Rabih Alameddine
In The Penguin Book of the International Short Story, writers from different nations, languages, and sensibilities come together in a globe-spanning and long overdue tour of modern fiction. In “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” Haruki Murakami brings us a man who believes a giant amphibian is enlisting him to protect his city from an impending earthquake. In “War of the Clowns,” Mozambique’s Mia Couto sketches a perfect allegory for our divided culture. In the predecessor story to her iconic novel The Vegetarian, Han Kang depicts a protagonist quietly undergoing an unlikely transformation. A Colm Tóibín character thinks, “I do not even believe in Ireland,” while Carol Bensimon reflects from Brazil, “All great ideas seem like bad ones at some point.” Salman Rushdie brings us to unsettled rural India, Olga Tokarczuk to an ugly woman exhibit at the circus, Abdellah Taïa to the queer Arab world, Ted Chiang to a far-off galaxy.
The United States is far from the center of the literary universe. This anthology is reminiscent of iconic director Bong Joon Ho’s line about overcoming “the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles” to enter a new world of film—the work of thoughtful and accomplished translators opens the door wide for those curious about what lies beyond the Western canon and classroom. Writers from six continents, ranging from new voices to literary icons, each offer a window into a distinct point of view, both transcending and illuminating their place of origin. They offer not only captivating prose, but a reminder of the power of the imagination across space and time.
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