Advance copy

Just what I was looking for last week. I think you will appreciate this off-the-beaten-path read, too.

From the promotional packet:

With contributions from writers who have published widely on the subject, as well as those who are visiting the subject for the first time, Granta 102 examines how we think - and write - about the natural world at a time when the future of our planet is up for debate as never before.

In this captivating new issue:

■ Paul Farley and Niall Griffiths revisit the Liverpool estate of their childhoods and find a world on the cusp of town and country
■ Kathleen Jamie takes an unusual look at the inner landscape of our bodies
■ Benjamin Kunkel remembers his hippy childhood in rural Colorado
■ Matthew Power finds respite from the concrete jungle in a garden in the Bronx
■ Edward Platt reports on the birds that migrate over the Israeli-Palestinian border
■ Robert Macfarlane and photographer Justin Partyka explore a rural way of life on the brink of disappearing
■ Richard Mabey visits the oldest tree in Europe: the Fortingall Yew
■ Jonathan Raban ponders the mythology of the American West
■ Philip Marsden rediscovers the nineteenth-century nature writer, J T Blight.
■ Magnum photographer, Donovan Wylie, photographs the dismantling of the Maze Prison

Plus: Seamus Heaney, Mark Cocker, Anthony Doerr, Jim Holt, David Heatley, Roger Deakin's notebooks, poetry by Sean O'Brien, a short story from debut writer Lydia Peelle, and graphic fiction from David Heatley.

Visit Granta online.