What was my fantasy of John? Meeting him, pursuing our relationship – it all seemed preordained. I loved John and, most of the time, early on, felt that he loved me too. But the beginning of our relationship also felt like a negotiation, like a setting-out of terms, which, being young and in awe, I…
It has been a long time since Granta last published literary criticism. In this issue, Christian Lorentzen confronts a specious new form of pseudo-materialist critique – colophonoscopy, in a word – that would have taken György Lukács to task for bothering to read Balzac when he should have been mod…