This special, double issue of Granta is organized to fill a gap, a felt emptiness in current literary achievement. At a time when it is imperative that we have a literature and a language that are responsible, accountable and instrumental to the lives of we are having to lead - a literature that is an adversary of oppression and not an accomplice to it - we have instead a writing that is remarkable only for its dubious feats of technical virtuosity, its relentless self-referentiality and its deliberate retreat from experience. Granta 6 is dedicated to a different set of possibilities - the possibilities of political engagement.