Granta 88: Mothers

Description

Featuring John McGahern on his mother's struggle for health and happiness in Catholic Ireland, Edmund White on his mother's battle with the girdle in Texas; Alexander Fuller on bearing a child in Africa; Paul Theroux on an American matriarchy and new fiction by Hilary Mantel and Jayne Anne Phillips. Plus Ryszard Kapuscinski on his memories of the Second World War, Jim Lewis on the art of falling asleep, and a portfolio of photographs of the surprising things writer Joseph Mitchell collected from the streets of New York.

IAN JACK edited Granta from 1995 to 2007, having previously edited the Independent on Sunday. He has written on many subjects, including the Titanic, Kathleen Ferrier, the Hatfield train crash and the three members of the IRA active-service unit who were killed on Gibraltar. He is the editor of The Granta Book of Reportage and The Granta Book of India, and the author of a collection of journalism, The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain. He lives in London and now writes for the Guardian.