New Writing/Jubilee, Granta 87 Edited by Ian Jack: Granta has been around for 25 years now, a consistently interesting and eclectic magazine of non-fiction, fiction, reportage and photography. Magazine isn't quite the right word: these are book-length publications that appear four times a year, back issues of which sell well in second-hand bookshops - always a good measure of popularity, writes Rosita Boland
Among the writers featured over the years have been Jonathan Raban, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Bruce Chatwin, Norman Lewis, Lynn Barber, Edward Said, Doris Lessing, Anita Desai, A.L. Kennedy, Saul Bellow, Martha Gellhorn. Every issue contains some gem, and some issues are a treasury. A few are: Nos 10 and 26, Travel Writing; No 15, The Fall of Saigon; No 23, Home (which caused a furore by having Larkin's quote, "they f**k you up" on the cover); No 37, The Family, No 61, The Sea; No 71, Shrinks.
Granta is where you usually read things first, be they chapters from novels-in-progress, such as Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, or work by a then-unknown Zadie Smith. Jonathan Raban tried out the opening chapters of his classic book on migration and America, Hunting Mr Heartbreak, in Granta. It ran four previously unpublished pieces by Bruce Chatwin after he died. It has done issues on the Best of Young American Novelists and the Best of Young British Novelists. It's had whole issues on places, always excellent: London, Africa, America, Australia, India. There have been themed issues - on death, celebrity, the body, biography, love stories, news, losers, money and food. The very Granta you miss will always be the one you hunt down later, to find the piece you know now you must read.
Jubilee contains a fascinating piece by Tim Adams on Benjamin Pell, a Londoner who became obsessed with rummaging through the rubbish of London's influential; a grimly thoughtful piece by Philip Gourevitch on the anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda; and an odd piece by Jan Morris about shame and picking her nose. There's new fiction from Paul Auster, William Boyd and Helen Simpson. Martin Amis contributes a portion of his screenplay for Northanger Abbey. Blake Morrison writes on the reaction to his books about his family. Wendell Steavenson spends time with an Iraqi terrorist called Osama - but not the Osama.
Long after most newspaper magazine supplements have dropped them in favour of lifestyle-orientated pictures, Granta has always championed the sadly underestimated and neglected medium of the photo-essay. Anniversary issues are tricky to mark, especially when you are already doing a fine job. Unfortunately, the magazine gives in to the conceit of a 30-page colour photo essay on the course of the English river, Granta, for no other reason than the river has the same name as the magazine. This obscure connection doesn't make good picture essay material. But hey, it's the magazine's birthday. It's allowed a mistake every 25 years.
Rosita Boland is a poet and an Irish Times journalist
Jubilee, Granta 87 Edited by Ian Jack Granta, 320pp. £9.99