Granta 118

Be it a wrong turn, a bad relationship, a debilitating illness or a war, every action creates a reaction, every move is followed by another move. How do we get out of what we've gotten ourselves into? Granta 118 zooms in close on the phenomenon of the exit strategy.In a new story, Alice Munro writes of an elderly woman whose attempts to care for her husband are undermined by her own deteriorating thought processes; Claire Messud searches for her father's past in Beirut, Lebanon as he lays dying in a hospital in the US; and Aleksandar Hemon remembers the importance of smuggling his family's dog out of war-torn Sarajevo.Exit Strategies also features new writing by John Barth, Anne Tyler, Ann Beattie, and newcomer Chinelo Okparanta - examining how we get ourselves out and the repercussions that follow. Hindsight is 20/20, but it's what we do moving forward that defines us and - in the best of all worlds - redeems us.