Fiction:This issue of Granta is Scottish-born editor Ian Jack's last. He's been editing the famous "magazine of new writing" for 12 years, and has 48 issues with his name on the flyleaf.
Jack, who worked as a journalist at the Sunday Times for 16 years, and then went on to become a co-founder of the Independent on Sunday in 1989, now writes a weekly column for the Guardian.
Granta, which appears four times a year, has been around in its present form since 1979, and has become an enormously respected and highly influential forum for fiction, memoir, reportage and documentary photography.
Its contributors have included Bruce Chatwin, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Martha Gellhorn, Saul Bellow, Milan Kundera, Gabriel García Márquez, Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux. Their issues of Best of Young British Novelists and Best of Young American Novelists attract international debate.
However, even though Ian Jack has had the editor's rare luxury of knowing that writers, both famous and emerging, all aspire to write for Granta, the best thing to happen to him in his tenure was Sigrid Rausing, who is not a writer at all, but a philanthropist wealthy beyond imagination.
In 2005, Swedish-born Rausing, who is the billionaire heir to her family business - Tetra-Pak cartons - bought Granta publishing. Although the company had turned over a very modest profit of £168,000 (about €250,000) the previous year, the acquisition of Granta magazine and its book-publishing arm by a billionaire philanthropist has assured its future beyond doubt - the stuff of dreams for any independent publishing house.
JACK'S LAST ISSUE takes as its theme "the deep end", an unusually abstract topic for Granta, whose themes tend to be realist - death, family, war, ambition, celebrity. Publisher Diana Athill, now 90, writes a characteristically spiky and moving piece about her descent into the deep end of old age, Somewhere Towards the End. Her markers across the decades are her lovers, who continued to court her well into her 70s. At 90, she continues to live a fuller life than many half her age.
The stand-out piece in this issue is Louise Carpenter's extraordinary tale of English sisters Louise and Ida Cook, born in 1901 and 1904 respectively, now long dead. The sisters never married, and lived together all their adult lives until they died. Their collective passion was opera, and they saved up for two years, eating only bread rolls, to buy third-class tickets to sail to New York in 1926 to hear Galli-Curci, who had promised them tickets if they could make it over. Then, improbably, Ida began to write romantic novels for Mills & Boon, and became one of their most popular and successful authors, later writing an autobiography, now long out of print, on which Carpenter's piece is based.
On Ida's royalties, the sisters went from being poor to wealthy, and travelled Europe to hear opera. When war broke out, many of the Jewish opera singers in Germany whom the sisters had by then befriended appealed for their help. In all, the sisters managed to get 26 people out of Hitler's Germany. Carpenter tracked down the last surviving one to her home in New York, which makes for an unforgettable coda.
Paul Theroux writes a piece about his dead father, ironically entitled Dear Old Dad. It's a peculiar, uncomfortable piece in which he is vitriolic about his mother, also dead: no Brysonesque positive memoir of childhood here. Did we, the readers, really need to know such vicious details from private lives of those who now can't speak for themselves?
Novelist Gerard Donovan has a short story set in Salthill in Galway, about three men who go swimming together every morning one summer. It's a beautifully told, haunting piece about the clumsiness and rituals of male friendships.
By contrast, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's story, On Monday Last Week, about the seduction of a childminder by the child's mother, is disappointingly flat, and fatally weakened by its cliched ending.
Hugh Raffles contributes a wonderfully esoteric piece about the tradition of cricket-fighting in China, recounting how he shadowed those who buy, sell and fight crickets: huge sums of money are gambled on this ancient practice.
Jason Cowley, journalist, critic and previously an editor at the Observer, has now taken over the highly coveted editorship. Signing off, Ian Jack repeated the farewell given by his predecessor Bill Buford in 1995, and credited Granta's readers as being "the world's smartest and most literate strangers".
Rosita Boland is a writer and an Irish Times journalist. Her most recent book is A Secret Map of Ireland (New Island)
Fiction: Granta 98: The Deep End Edited by Ian Jack Granta, 256pp. £9.99