Granta 129 brings you twenty-two meditations on fate in all its many forms. From Joseph Roth's reflection on Sarajevo in the wake of the First World War to Cynthia Ozick's exploration of the limits of belief, this issue stretches our understanding of fate, both in fact and in fiction. Striking the keys of the same typewriter that once sat under J.G. Ballard's fingers, Will Self reimagines the legendary writer's last days. Mark Gevisser investigates transgender identities in America. Louise Erdrich presents a world where bodies can be traded in for a digital afterlife. In an extract from her...

This issue of Granta is about the difference between the world as we see it and the world as it actually is, beyond our faulty memories and tired understanding. It's also about the borderlands of politics and reason, and of reality and transcendence, in contested territories. Ludmila Ulitskaya's diary of cancer treatment in Russia and Israel Raja Shehadeh on emptying his mother's house in Ramallah Janine di Giovanni remembers Iraq before and after the American invasion Charles Glass on the jihadist occupation of an Armenian village in Syria Fiction by Jesse Ball, Kevin Canty, Jon Fosse,...