Granta 114: Aliens [Kindle Edition]

As you should have gathered from Amazon's product description, despite the title and ambiguous cover, this is about human alienation, be that national or personal, and nothing whatsoever to do with Mulder, Scully and little green beings.

The edition kicks off with a terrific fiction extract from a forthcoming book (The Buddha in the Attic) by Julie Otsuka about Japanese brides heading to the US - which is a book that went straight on my "to read" list. Also wonderful is Mami Mun's short piece on alienation within a marriage and Chris Dennis' original Here is What You Do about prison life for first time and unlikely first offender. The only fiction pieces that didn't work so well for me was Madeleine Thien's complex book extract here entitled James which didn't fit so well into the short format and a very short Roberto Bolano piece which is one of those four page, one sentence pieces that always seem to be style over substance to me - although kudos for the translator for making it readable - albeit like being locked inside a teenager's head. There's also a short new piece by Booker winning Aravind Adiga, although it didn't do much for me.

By and large the non-fiction content is of a more consistent quality in this edition. There are two terrific articles on the English - one from Philip Olterman comparing British life with German stereotypes, and one from Paul Theroux that highlights 20 years of bemusement about British news events - there's nothing to be proud of here from a British perspective here, but it highlights the bemusement of living in another land.

There are also interesting pieces on walking in the West Bank (from Robert Macfarlane), the Rawandan civil war (Dinaw Mengestu) as well as moving personal reflections from Binyavanga Wainaina on the urge to write and from Ann Patchett in one of those pieces that Granta excels at - exposing a world that you had never thought about, the retirement of nuns - surely prime examples of alienation in the modern world. In a similar fashion, Mark Grevisser writes about the life of the underground black gay scene in Apartheid South Africa.

As so often the photo essays in Granta work less well here - one set in Northern Ireland during the troubles, and one featuring inland Iran.

It's not the strongest edition I've read of Granta, but the pot luck approach is one of the joys of reading it for me. And it may be my imagination, but there appears to be an intentional move to more international sourcing of articles which is always interesting.

There is some outstanding writing in this quarter's Granta. The subject being aliens it could be said to be profoundly depressing, but there are voices from all over the world, and indeed the cover art suggests that many of us are true aliens, walking a strange moonlit path across space to our destiny. Some of this writing is extraordinary. Julie Otsuka opens this volume with the story of women coming from Japan to the United States, carrying the pictures of their future husbands, each having been sold a story that promised houses, loving relationships. Otsuka's piece is silent on what they found on arrival - the truth is beyond any guess.

There is a piece on the Congo by Dinaw Mengestu. It is hard to know how it is possible to pass any comment on the Congo. No one knows, in truth, how its people are surviving the lawless and heartless conditions in which they live and in which many of them subsist or die. They Always Come In The Night, records some of the stories, an empty almost proto-ironic `celebration' of fifty years of independence. The rebels simply wait for the Congolese military to leave a region and come back to practice their cruelties, using pillage, terror and sexual violence as punishment for co-operating with the UN and Congolese forces fighting them. For the villagers under this regime there is only the hope that someday, someone else out there in the world will know about them, and that they will not have been forgotten.

Ann Patchett, the American writer, offers a gentle and insightful piece of reportage, about the Sisters of Mercy order of nuns in their old age. But it was the short story contributed by Chris Dennis, a new young American writer, that gave me the strongest sense of an alien in a world he doesn't understand. It tells of a prison cell, a relationship between two men, one a seasoned prisoner, in for 15 years for manslaughter, the other a misfit, a young man in for a first offence involving drugs, a prison virgin whose family consists of Nanny, an old lady who he thinks is his grandmother, and two dogs, who are regarded as members of the family. It contrasts a being of profound fragility with an alien system of living. I cannot tell you outright why this story is so poignant and descriptive, other than to say it touches deeply on survival in an alien world, and another kind of love.

All 'Granta - Magazine of New Writing' publications satisfy a thirst for brilliant content: reportage, biography, fiction and photo essays (which I adore), and this edition is no different. It is intelligent, without being elitist. An excellent 'alternative' to conventional reading.