Granta's spring issue, guest-edited by award-winning writer Rana Dasgupta, explores membranes of the tissue, self, collective, nation, species and cosmos. It features new poetry by Andrew McMillan, Tishani Doshi and Ida Brjel, a new translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky by Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris, as well as photography from Anita Khemka, Arturo Soto and Mnica de la Torre. Granta 151: Membranes showcases cutting-edge fiction from Lydia Davis, Fatin Abbas, Steven Heighton, J. Robert Lennon, Mahreen Sohail and Chloe Wilson, plus a host of thought-provoking essays: - Emanuele Coccia on birth, metamorphosis and the very strange miracle of life - Mark Doty on gentrification and homelessness in New York City - Anouchka Grose on infidelity and the idea of the unwanted third - Ruchir Joshi on all those kids his son once was - Kapka Kassabova on Lake Ohrid - Anita Roy on the great crested newt - Esther Woolfson on the relationship between humans and animals Plus: Eyal Weizman in conversation with Rana Dasgupta, on contemporary architectural strategies for repelling and dividing people.

Kapka Kassabova first set foot in a tango studio ten years ago and, from that moment, she was hooked. With the beat of tango driving her on and the music filling her head, she's danced across the world, from Auckland to Edinburgh, from Berlin to Buenos Aires, putting in hours of practice for fleeting moments of dance-floor ecstasy, suffering blisters and heart-break along the way. Here, in sparkling, spring-heeled prose, Kapka takes us inside the esoteric world of tango to tell the story of the dance, from its Afro roots to its sequined stars and back. Twelve Minutes of Love is a timeless tale of exile and longing, death and desire, love and belonging.

“Remarkable: a book about borders that makes the reader feel sumptuously free.” —Peter Pomerantsev In this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the “Red Riviera” on the Black Sea, she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling electrified fence whose barbs pointed inward toward the enemy: the citizens of the totalitarian regime. Kassabova discovers a place that has been shaped by successive forces of history: the Soviet and Ottoman empires, and, older still, myth and legend. Her exquisite portraits of fire walkers, smugglers, treasure hunters, botanists, and border guards populate the book. There are also the ragged men and women who have walked across Turkey from Syria and Iraq. But there seem to be nonhuman forces at work here too: This densely forested landscape is rich with curative springs and Thracian tombs, and the tug of the ancient world, of circular time and animism, is never far off. Border is a scintillating, immersive travel narrative that is also a shadow history of the Cold War, a sideways look at the migration crisis troubling Europe, and a deep, witchy descent into interior and exterior geographies.

A collection of the year's best essays, selected by award-winning journalist and New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz "The world is abundant even in bad times,"guest editor Kathryn Schulz writes in her introduction, "it is lush with interestingness, and always, somewhere, offering up consolation or beauty or humor or happiness, or at least the hope of future happiness."The essays Schulz selected are a powerful time capsule of 2020, showcasing that even if our lives as we knew them stopped, the beauty to be found in them flourished. From an intimate account of nursing a loved one in the early days of the pandemic, to a masterful portrait of grieving the loss of a husband as the country grieved the loss of George Floyd, this collection brilliantly shapes the grief, hardship, and hope of a singular year. The Best American Essays 2021 includes ELIZABETH ALEXANDER - HILTON ALS - GABRIELLE HAMILTON - RUCHIR JOSHI - PATRICIA LOCKWOOD- CLAIRE MESSUD - WESLEY MORRIS - BETH NGUYEN - JESMYN WARD and others