LITERARY MAGAZINES HAVE a bad rap. Not, I suppose, among the literati, if they still call themselves that. Do they? I suppose I ought to know, since I suppose I'd be one by anyone's reckoning, and yet the idea makes me nervous. But then, literary magazines, at least of a certain sort, make me nervous. Take The London Review of Books. I know it's meant to be just the sort of thing I'd never be seen without, and yet its pages always give me the sense of a club that wouldn't quite have me as a member. Yes, it's full of wonderful things. I just never quite feel as if they belong to me.

And in any case, we heard tell, literary magazines were all doomed by the flood-tide of wonders with which the internet is awash. The future's bright, the future's full of blogs, energetic voices and opinions which, by now, have surely swept the old-fashioned world of paper and covers right away.

So fair enough to wonder if the relaunching of dear old Granta under a new editor, Jason Cowley, is cause for any sort of celebration at all. I am, however, pleased to report that it is.

First, let us discard the notion of literary magazines altogether. I am never entirely comfortable, in any case, bunging writing (of any kind) into categories (of any kind). When I first encountered Granta - nigh on two decades ago - I'm not sure I realised, at first, that it was a magazine at all. It looked then, and looks now, like a book, a neat, square-shouldered paperback book. . . but one full of varied treasures. A book or a magazine, who cared? I knew nothing then of Granta's illustrious history, its beginnings in 19th-century Cambridge and an early roster of contributors that included Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and A.A. Milne. I knew nothing of its “rebirth” (as Granta's own, newly souped-up website has it) in 1979, but I swiftly came to know that I could, as an eager young reader, count on Granta to introduce me to a host of writers who would come to live in my personal pantheon: Angela Carter, Tobias Wolff, James Fenton, Redmond O'Hanlon, Jeanette Winterson...if, as an American, I ever questioned why I'd bothered moving to Britain, Granta gave me a good answer to be getting on with.

But then Granta faded from my consciousness. It was never wholly gone; but did I need it? To be fair, one couldn't say this was Granta's fault. It stayed, as it had been, full of original writing, work of scope and quality; yet all the while the world around became a noisier and noisier place, one that seemed to be moving faster all the time. (This, despite the fact that those literary blogs never quite seemed to take over in the way some folk had predicted.) What place was there in such a world for a quarterly magazine...an irregular quarterly, at that?

But reading Granta 101, I was reminded of a conversation I had with Philip Gourevitch, editor of the venerable and also newly relaunched Paris Review. He told me he'd rather be editing a quarterly than a weekly; there's no chance you can keep up with the news, so you have to take the broader view and be as certain as you can that the pieces you run will stand the test of time.

Granta was, and now continues to be, a magazine worth re-reading. Cowley's first issue entirely lacks the stuffy air of the clubroom. There is memoir and murder, prose and even some poetry. This first issue, Cowley tells us, has no theme, and yet it seemed to me that many of the pieces addressed issues of identity - perhaps appropriate for a publication finding its feet again.

Whether it's Ruth Franklin addressing her own nightmares, Tim Lott his connection to a murder, Douglas Coupland his whole manner of thinking, or Owen Sheers investigating how nuclear testing in the 1950s affected the population of Christmas Island, there's a sense of self-reflection running through nearly all the pieces.

Particularly powerful are Xan Rice's essay about a father and son - the son a friend of his - fatally drawn to fly though African war zones, and Andrew Hussey's bleak vision of the violence erupting in the banlieue of Paris, entitled “The Paris Intifada”. (Nick Danziger's terrific photos accompany this piece, though you can only tell they're terrific if you head to the website; I can't fathom why they have been printed in the magazine, so small and dark are they therein.)

Annie Proulx's story of a old folks' home reminded me why I liked her work in the first place; and if I was not enamoured of Rick Moody's story, “Videos of the Dead”, why, that's the pleasure of a magazine, surely: you don't have to like everything in it. All you need to feel, when you've turned the last page, is that you're curious to see the next issue. Granta 101 does the trick.

www.granta.com

Granta 101 edited by Jason Cowley
Granta, £10.99; 256pp Buy the book here

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