Granta

Granta hits the big five-oh this year with its fiftieth issue, the last to be put to bed by Bill Buford since he took over the foundering university magazine sixteen years ago and turned it into the foremost literary magazine of its time. There is much to be emulated in the history of Buford's Granta and nothing to be condemned. If Buford had a weakness, it was his penchant for grown-up Boy's Writing, which in large enough doses tends to obscure the things of life behind a uniformly grey mist. But small doses of Boy's Writing may be just what The New Yorker (where Buford is taking over as fiction editor) needs to pull it out of its present slump. The best thing in Number 50 is Germaine Greer's story of a journey on the Shanghai Express. Next best: Norman Lewis's account of meeting Hemingway in Cuba.