Granta 94: “On the Road Again. Where Travel Writing Went Next.”
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 07.13.06 | 7:43 AM ET
The latest issue of Granta, On the Road Again, focuses on travel, and on Sunday, the Guardian published a thoughtful piece about the issue and Granta’s proud travel-writing history. Writer Robert McCrum notes that former Granta editor Bill Buford “charmed and bamboozled” contributors such as Paul Theroux, Redmond O’Hanlon and Bruce Chatwin for stories. “Buford celebrated travel writing as a cocktail of reportage, storytelling and ‘a narrative eloquence’ that placed it ‘somewhere between fiction and fact,’” McCrum writes. “Now, in more sober times, new editor Ian Jack, who locates the genre somewhere more trustworthy and responsible, has come up with an absorbing edition subtitled ‘Where Travel Writing Went Next.’”
McCrum continues:
In the age of easyJet and ba.com, travel is no longer a carefree episode of private truancy conducted by canoe or donkey. From its opening pages, this volume has CO2 and global warming on its mind. ‘All we know,’ writes Jack, ‘is that climate change is slowly eating away our belief in permanence.’ This mood is sustained in James Hamilton-Paterson’s piece ‘The End of Travel’, an elegy for the supplanting of travel by tourism, combined with a marvellously grumpy moan about cruise ships.
Granta’s Web site features the issue’s table of contents. For the record, Theroux, O’Hanlon and the late Chatwin are not among the contributors.
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
