Granta #170 - Winners

Granta #170 - Winners

It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game. Any schoolchild can smell the rat in the adage. Everybody knows a game is not worth watching unless the players are trying to win - unless someone is willing to risk the high tackle, smash the serve, steal the base, or throw the knock-out punch.

The winter issue of Granta explores how ideas about winning and competition suffuse modern society. We return to the magazine's tradition of sports writing. Articles include Nico Walker on the rise and fall of American football - from Jim Thorpe to Deion Sanders; Clare Bucknell on the history of tennis; and Declan Ryan's report from a boxing match between British heavyweights Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois. Fiction includes very short stories from Caryl Churchill and Kathryn Scanlan; two stories set in hospitals by Benjamin Nugent and K Patrick; Mircea Cartarescu on an archipelago infested with angels, and Edward Salem on nights out in the West Bank.

About Granta: Granta is a literary magazine and publisher in the United Kingdom whose mission centres on its "belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story's supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real." Granta has published twenty-seven Nobel Prize laureates.