Literary Tradition Pays a Visit to S.F. with Launch Party for Granta

​Literary magazine Granta is A Very Big Deal. (Writerly circles are sometimes okay with random capitalization.) Its contributors over the years include Sylvia Plath, Saul Bellow, Raymond Carver, and Milan Kundera. That the London-based quarterly has an event in San Francisco to celebrate the launch of its latest issue Granta 118: Exit Strategies is An Even Bigger Deal. That event is tonight (Tuesday) at City Lights Books

Peruvian-born writer Daniel Alarcon, who now lives in Oakland and who reads tonight, is a contributor to Granta 118 as well as one of San Francisco's own literary heavyweights, Zyzzyva. Alarcon explores the exit strategy of assuming a different identity while drinking in his father's hometown. It's one of several powerful stories on the same theme; Alice Munro depicts a woman searching for the physician who can help her memory loss, and Susan Minot pens a tale of a nun in Uganda aiming to rescue girls who've been abducted by rebel soldiers. Jacob Newberry contributes a memoir about confiding in friends during his struggle to come out of the closet -- and one friend's choice to remain inside it.

The reading for Granta 118 starts tonight (Tuesday, Feb. 7) at 7 p.m. at City Lights Books. Admission is free.