Granta

on May 20, 2015

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From Nobel laureates to debut novelists, international translations to investigative journalism, each themed issue of Granta turns the attention of the world’s best writers on to one aspect of the way we live now. Granta does not have a political or literary manifesto, but it does have a belief in the power and urgency of the story and its supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real. Granta magazine was founded in 1889 by students at Cambridge University as The Granta, a periodical of student politics, badinage and literary enterprise, named after the river that runs through the town. In this original incarnation it published the work writers like A.A. Milne, Michael Frayn, Stevie Smith, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.

In 1979, Bill Buford transformed Granta from a student publication to the literary quarterly it remains today. Granta Books came ten years later, quickly becoming one of the most independent-minded and prestigious literary publishers in the UK. Granta’s Best of Young issues, released decade by decade, introduce the most important voices of each generation – in Britain, America, Brazil and Spain – and have been defining the contours of the literary landscape since 1983. As the Observer writes: ‘In its blend of memoirs and photojournalism, and in its championing of contemporary realist fiction, Granta has its face pressed firmly against the window, determined to witness the world.’

China Liked TPP—Until U.S. Officials Opened Their Mouths

on May 20, 2015

After a brief but frightening setback for proponents, U.S. congressional leaders looked set on May 13 to pass legislation for an eventual up-or-down (“fast-track”) vote on what would be one of the world’s largest trade accords, the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The accord, a project behind which U.S. President Barack Obama has thrown his full support, would originally join together 12 countries bordering the Pacific Ocean.

Censorship and Conscience

Foreign Authors and the Challenge of Chinese Censorship

By Alexa Olesen on May 20, 2015

In this report, PEN American Center (PEN) examines how foreign authors in particular are navigating the heavily censored Chinese book industry. China is one of the largest book publishing markets in the world, with total revenue projected to exceed $16 billion in 2015 and a growth rate of roughly 10% per year. The Chinese are buying more books and have a growing hunger for works by foreign authors. In 2013, China’s retail book sales topped $8.2 billion, a ten percent increase from 2012. Translated works account for a small but growing portion of that total. Chinese publishers acquired 16,115 foreign titles in 2012, a jump of more than 60 percent from 2004 when the rights to just over 10,000 were bought. American and British books are among the most popular. The question of whether and to what extent an author should consent to proposed censorship of his or her work is a question of conscience. As the Chinese market grows and Chinese publishers and readers become more important to foreign writers and publishers, it is essential to establish principles to ensure that growing interplay between the Chinese and the global literary communities does not result in routinized, ever-increasing, and scarcely acknowledged acceptance of censorship. On the basis of this report’s findings, PEN has identified a set of core principles that foreign authors and their colleagues should take into consideration when preparing to publish in mainland China. These include assessing the likelihood that a book will be censored, working with the Chinese publisher to negotiate any proposed changes to the text, vetting the final translation to identify any unauthorized changes, and refusing to permit changes that would fundamentally alter the book’s core arguments or diminish its literary merit, or that delete or distort references to major historical, political, and human rights concerns in China. PEN encourages authors, editors, publishers, agents, and translators to carefully consider these principles before entering into contracts or other arrangements that relate to publication on the mainland. To avoid being unwitting accessories to the world’s most powerful and repressive censorship regime, participants in the global publishing industry must inform themselves and consider carefully the questions of conscience raised by publishing in China.

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Alexa Olesen
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Self-Censorship
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Nonfiction Writing
Journalism
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PEN International

No Ordinary Disruption

By Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, Jonathan Woetzel on May 19, 2015

Our intuition on how the world works could well be wrong. We are surprised when new competitors burst on the scene, or businesses protected by large and deep moats find their defenses easily breached, or vast new markets are conjured from nothing. Trend lines resemble saw-tooth mountain ridges.

The world not only feels different. The data tell us it is different. Based on years of research by the directors of the McKinsey Global Institute, No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Forces Breaking All the Trends is a timely and important analysis of how we need to reset our intuition as a result of four forces colliding and transforming the global economy: the rise of emerging markets; the accelerating impact of technology on the natural forces of market competition; an aging world population; and accelerating flows of trade, capital, and people.

Our intuitions formed during a uniquely benign period for the world economy—often termed the Great Moderation. Asset prices were rising, cost of capital was falling, labor and resources were abundant, and generation after generation was growing up more prosperous than their parents.

But the Great Moderation has gone. The cost of capital may rise. The price of everything from grain to steel may become more volatile. The world’s labor force could shrink. Individuals, particularly those with low job skills, are at risk of growing up poorer than their parents.

What sets No Ordinary Disruption apart is depth of analysis combined with lively writing informed by surprising, memorable insights that enable us to quickly grasp the disruptive forces at work. For evidence of the shift to emerging markets, consider the startling fact that, by 2025, a single regional city in China—Tianjin—will have a GDP equal to that of the Sweden, or that, in the decades ahead, half of the world’s economic growth will come from 440 cities including Kumasi in Ghana or Santa Carina in Brazil that most executives today would be hard-pressed to locate on a map.

What we are now seeing is no ordinary disruption but the new facts of business life—facts that require executives and leaders at all levels to reset their operating assumptions and management intuition.—PublicAffairs