This issue of Granta begins from a problem that politics increasingly speaks through feeling, while public feeling is increasingly organised by political machinery.

Anger, grievance, belonging, humiliation and fear arrive dressed as evidence; meanwhile, technological and institutional life cultivates its own deadened affectlessness. Guest editors Devorah Baum and Josh Appignanesi do not oppose emotion to reason so much as ask how each has already contaminated the other. 

The result is a deliberately mixed form—fiction, essays, poetry, photography and conversation—moving between private sensation and collective life. Contributors include Olga Tokarczuk, Hisham Matar, Poppy Sebag-Montefiore, Peter Pomerantsev, Adam Phillips, Sophie Mackintosh and others, writing on exile, touch, propaganda, political fantasy and the strange poverty of public language. There is no wrap up on “post-truth” politics, the issue examines what facts cannot explain by themselves: why certain stories feel true, why others fail to move us, and how politics enters the body before it becomes an argument.

Granta 146, Winter 2019 paperback. Light rubbing and minor handling wear to covers; pages clean, binding sound.