RUSHDIE, Salman (and others).
Granta 3: The End of the English Novel.
FIRST EDITION, FIRST AND ONLY PRINTING. Edited by Bill Buford and Pete de Bolla. Cambridge: Granta, King's College, Cambridge, 1980.
Small octavo. 216 pp. Approximately 210 × 146 mm. Original gold-yellow pictorial card wrappers, the cover illustration by John Blanche; the one-page John Blanche insert, with an Oxford University Press advertisement to the reverse, present at page 108 (this leaf is frequently lacking). Signed by Salman Rushdie on the first page of his contribution. Near fine, with faint creasing to the upper corner tips of the first few leaves.
Granta 3 carries the first appearance, in any form, of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children — printed some months before the Jonathan Cape book edition of April 1981. The issue prints the first two chapters of the novel, "The Perforated Sheet" (pp. 17–32) and "Mercurochrome" (pp. 32–46). The issue is itself a notable literary document. Bill Buford's title essay argued that the British novel had exhausted its conventional realist tradition and that its renewal lay with writers working outside it — "the end of the English novel and the beginning of the British one." He set the Rushdie excerpt alongside new work by Angela Carter, Desmond Hogan, Alan Sillitoe, Emma Tennant, and Russell Hoban (an excerpt from Riddley Walker), with a symposium on the British novel contributed by Lorna Sage, Chris Bigsby, Frederick Bowers, James Gindin, and Christine Brooke-Rose.
The first three issues of Granta in their original wrappers are now hard to find; the early issues are far more often seen as later reprints carrying the redesigned Granta house-style cover. This is the true first printing, in the original John Blanche wrappers.
SKU TO-2026-103
