Author(s): Ian Jack (ed)

Essays

Country Life: how it is lived, how it has changed, and how the changes are far from over Country Life: how it is lived, how it has changed, and how the changes are far from over. One of the world's oppositions used to be: country versus town, ale v claret, fields v houses, nature v artifice, starlight v lamplight. But does that division still persist? Does the truly rural still exist? This issue of Granta has dispatches from the greenery. Ranging from English fox-hunters to the rice-planters of the Ganges delta: Tim Adams goes on a fox hunt, Craig Taylor returnsto Akenfield thirty-five years after Ronald Blythe's landmark book about the Suffolk farming town, and Jeff Sharlet finds out what's eatingrural Coloradoans. Plus Margaret Atwood, James Hamilton-Paterson, Barry Lopez, Orhan Pamuk and Tim Winton on the weather, new fiction by Richard Powers, Matthew Reisz on his grandmother's affair with Havelock Ellis, the grandfather of sexual studies and a never-before published interview with Bob Dylan in 1963 by Studs Terkel. About the Author: Ian Jack has edited Granta since 1995. He began his career in journalism on a weekly newspaper in Scotland in the 1960s. Between 1970 and1986 he worked for the Sunday Times as a reporter, editor, feature writer and foreign correspondent (mainly in the Indian Subcontinent). He was a co-founder of the Independent on Sunday in 1989 and edited that newspaper between 1991 and 1995. His awards in Britain include those for reporter, journalist and editor of the year. A book of his writing about Britain, Before the Oil Ran Out, was published by Secker and Warburg in 1987 and republished by Vintage in 1997. He lives with his family in London.