John Freeman shot to international fame with his contentious 2009 book Shrinking the World: The 4000-Year Story Of How Email Came To Rule Our Lives.
He was a guest at the Auckland Writers' Festival that year and very difficult to correspond with because he refused to use email at all, insisting on post and telephones. It is likely he has changed his position these days since this anthology contains the work of some 22 contributors. The long, arduous process of editing a book like this often requires detailed communication between editor and writer and these writers are far flung; hailing from America, Europe, the Caribbean, Pakistan and Iceland. "An essential map to the best writing in the world," reads the puff on the back. Actually, not all the world: there are no inclusions from the Pacific or Australasia, a fact tiresomely common in anthologies from the so-called centres of culture and literature.
This volume is the first of an intended series edited by Freeman, who was a long-standing editor of Granta. The semi-global reach of that magazine is evident in the high standing of some of the writers. Native American Louise Erdrich opens the volume with a vivid, short piece on how it is to arrive at her home reservation, where she finds peace and acceptance. David Mitchell's rational and very spooky story is about waking to a ghost standing at the foot of his bed is set in a small town in Japan. The experience, he writes, turned him from "a ghost-disbeliever to a ghost-agnostic".
The longest pieces in the book are the least successful. Haruki Murakami's fictional Drive My Car, about the female chauffeur to a famous actor, is flabby and trite. The final contribution from Lydia Davis, about her odd attempt to learn Norwegian by reading a dull family history that purports to be a novel, invites the reader to gloss over tedious, tangential detail.
Standout fiction includes Garments by Tahmima Anam, whose 2011 novel The Good Muslim is a powerful and empathetic tale of Islam extremism. During Freeman's last year as Granta editor, she was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. Her story takes us into a Bangladeshi sweat shop, where impoverished, badly treated women make pants called "Thanks", designed to squeeze and shape the fat bottoms of Western women. Another lively, risky piece is Garnette Cadogan's Black and Blue, on walking Kingston streets in his 1980's childhood and the walks he takes now, in contemporary New York.
