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.

“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.

Beginning with the very origins of life on Earth, Woolfson considers pre-historic human-animal interaction and traces the millennia-long evolution of conceptions of the soul and conscience in relation to the animal kingdom, and the consequences of our belief in human superiority. She explores our representation of animals in art, our consumption of them for food, our experiments on them for science, and our willingness to slaughter them for sport and fashion, as well as examining concepts of love and ownership. Drawing on philosophy and theology, art and history, as well as her own experience of living with animals and coming to know, love and respect them as individuals, Woolfson examines some of the most complex ethical issues surrounding our treatment of animals and argues passionately and persuasively for a more humble, more humane, relationship with the creatures who share our world.

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

From award-winning Australian author Chloe Wilson comes Hold Your Fire, a debut short story collection that will haunt you long after you turn the page. A steely mother doubts her husband’s guts and her son's capability, until a playground incident dramatically escalates. A young couple move into a house in which there’s been a recent murder, and fall under the spell of their peculiar, commanding neighbours. Two sisters are determined to detoxify themselves into perfection. A diver pushes herself and those around her to dangerous heights. Interspersed with these stories are lightning strikes of flash fiction: we glimpse a leopard in the apartment next door; plants grown out of a strange and miraculous soil; the spirit of a girl who’s been thrown down a well. Needle-sharp, effortlessly surprising and beautifully controlled, Hold Your Fire is a debut collection that introduces a fierce new talent. At each turn, Chloe Wilson offers a unique insight, a tear in the veil of our moral certainties. Her stories strip away the varnish of our decency to reveal the raw, fascinating truth beneath.