The Horror issue features original cover artwork by Jake and Dinos Chapman and a line-up of contributors that includes some of the greatest names in contemporary fiction. Stephen King tells the story of a retired judge with a deadly secret. Don DeLillo imagines a moviegoer-turned-stalker and Paul Auster writes of his mother's death. Rajesh Parameswaran dips into the mind of a tiger who escapes from a zoo and terrorizes a neighbourhood. Will Self writes of his blood disease and Daniel Alarcon explores the phenomenon of staged, high-camp blood baths. Mark Doty ruminates on a close encounter between Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker. CONTRIBUTORS: Daniel Alarcon, Paul Auster, Tom Bamforth, Roberto Bolano, Don DeLillo, Mark Doty, Sarah Hall, Stephen King, Kanitta Meechubot (artist), Julie Ostuka, D.A. Powell (poem), Rajesh Parameswaran, Santiago Roncagliolo, Will Self, Joy Williams.

In The Age of Wire and String, hailed by Robert Coover as "the most audacious literary debut in decades," Ben Marcus weilds together a new reality from the scrapheap of the past. Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles, and the weather are some of the recycled elements in Marcus's first collection—part fiction, part handbook—as familiar objects take on markedly unfamiliar meanings. Gradually, this makeshift world, in its defiance of the laws of physics and language, finds a foundation in its own implausibility, as Marcus produces new feelings and sensations—both comic and disturbing—in the definitive guide to an unpredictable yet exhilarating plane of existence.

The internationally bestselling author of The New York Trilogy, “one of America’s greatest living novelists,” dazzlingly reinvents the coming-of-age story (The Observer). Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster’s fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girlfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life. Three different narrators tell the story of Invisible, a novel that travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from Morningside Heights, to the Left Bank of Paris, to a remote island in the Caribbean. It is a book of youthful rage, unbridled sexual hunger, and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us into the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, between authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers” (The Times Literary Supplement). “Occasionally, a novel is so masterful it leaves you breathless. Paul Auster’s Invisible is such a novel.” —The Boston Globe “Magnificent . . . The results are revelatory.” —Houston Chronicle “As soon as you finish Paul Auster’s Invisible, you want to read it again . . . It is the finest novel Paul Auster has ever written.” —Clancy Martin, The New York Times Book Review “Auster has never been better.” —The Seattle Times

What are the ethics of writing about a place you visit as an outsider? With Granta's long tradition of travel writing in mind, we ask some of the foremost writers of the genre: is travel writing dead? Tara Bergin, Rana Dasgupta, Geoff Dyer, Eliza Griswold, Mohsin Hamid, Lindsey Hilsum, Colin Thubron, Pico Iyer, Ian Jack, Robert Macfarlane, Wendell Steavenson, Samanth Subramanian and Alexis Wright Plus: William Atkins investigates murder on the US-Mexico border Xan Rice goes back to school in South Africa David Flusfeder's road trip to Detroit and California in search of his father's past Xiaolu Guo leaves China's 'semi-tropical south' for the 'solemn and tough north' Janine di Giovanni's homesickness Amit Chaudhuri returns to the city of his birth New fiction from Edna O'Brien; poetry by Emily Berry and Zeyar Lynn; photography by Justin Jin, Carl De Keyzer and Andrew McConnell introduced by A Yi and Adam Marek

'Men are infamous and detestable who are destroyers of religion, squanderers of kingdoms and republics, and enemies of the virtues.' Niccolo Machiavelli Machiavelli (1459-1527) is one of the most influential modern political thinkers. His works, above all The Prince, The Discourses on Livy, The Florentine Histories and The Art of War, are still passionately discussed and continue to give rise to new visions of political action. Against the trite commonplace that Machiavelli was a teacher of evil who justified political immorality, Maurizio Viroli shows that Machiavaelli was concerned instead with the best way to attain true glory through political action and that his works were inspired by a profound love of republican liberty. Extracts are taken from the whole corpus of Machiavelli's works, including his personal letters.

A Romantic Narrative of the Loss of Captain Grant of The Brig Britannia and of the Adventures of his Children and Friends in his Discovery and Rescue. In Search of the Castaways (French: Les Enfants du capitaine Grant, lit. 'The Children of Captain Grant') is a novel by the French writer Jules Verne, published in 1867–68. The book tells the story of the quest for Captain Grant of the Britannia. After finding a bottle the captain had cast into the ocean after the Britannia is shipwrecked, Lord and Lady Glenarvan of Scotland contact Mary and Robert, the young daughter and son of Captain Grant, through an announcement in a newspaper. The government refuses to launch a rescue expedition, but Lord and Lady Glenarvan, moved by the children's condition, decide to do it by themselves.

Collects nine stories written between 1979 and 2011 that chronicle three decades of American life from the perspective of a range of characters, including a pair of nuns in the South Bronx and two astronauts orbiting the Earth.

'Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.' David Hume David Hume is generally recognized as the United Kingdom's greatest philosopher, as well as a notable historian and essayist and a central figure of the Enlightenment. Yet his work is delicately poised between scepticism and naturalism, between despair at the limited powers of the mind and optimism at the progress we can make by understanding it. This difficult balancing act has given rise to a multitude of different interpretations: reading Hume has never been free of controversy. In this new approach to his writings, Simon Blackburn describes how Hume can be considered one of the earliest, and most successful, evolutionary psychologists, weaving plausible natural accounts of the way we should think of ourselves and of how we have come to be what we are.