Literary magazines are born easily, very difficult to sustain and die easily, two respects in which they differ from human beings. For a literary magazine like Granta to have survived for 21 years is equivalent to a man passing the age of ninety: he looms as a triumph of the life principle, no matter how bent or wrinkled he may be. So it is with Granta: The First Twenty-One Years (Penguin India, Special Indian Price, £ 6.50) but with one big caveat: it isn’t wrinkled but still raring to go.

The First Twenty-One Years include, the best from 1980 to 2001. It has however left out the best of travel, reportage and family which has always been part of its milieu in each number, because these have been done in separate anthologies. All the same, one feels some of the outstanding pieces should have been here, if only for their literary quality.

For instance Redmond O'Hanlon: Into the Heart of Borneo, Bill Bryson: Fat Girls in Des Moines, Ian Jack’s Unsteady People, or some from the Family Album like Saul Bellow’s Memories of a Bootlegger’s Son, Blake Morrison’s And when did you last see your father? These would have enhanced the value of the present anthology, to show that literary qualities can be revealed even in non-literary subjects.

For someone who has followed almost every Granta number except for the time when supplies were disrupted either because of local reprints (never available) or because of the foreign exchange crunch in the mid-80s, just about every memorable literary piece is here.

These are, inter alia, Raymond Carver: Vitamins, Nadine Gordimer: City for the Dead, City for the Living, Richard Ford: Rock Springs , Hanif Kureshi: Exotic Politicians and Mullahs (must read now with all that is going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan), The State of Europe by some of the leading intellectuals in 1990 after the collapse of communism, Martha Gellhorn: Why I shall Never Return to Germany, Amitav Ghosh: Dancing in Cambodia, Harold Pinter: Girls and Diana and Athill: Editing Vidia.

There are others which are worthwhile to check out. Bill Buford (he was the Granta editor from 1979-1995) has the introductory essay, The End of the English Novel which got lost in the debate on the subject and the Novel being at Crossroads. It is useful to have it here as it tells you, what is wrong with the English novel — which is true of the Victorian novel: “middle class novel for middle class readers with middle class problems”.

British writing which has inspired Indian writing in English was immune to philosophical ideas — in fact to ideas as a whole — “innoculated against innovation by its pragmatism". Buford says that the four most influential writers on the American fiction ‘Renaissance’ Joyce, Kafka, Nabokov and “especially Borges” simply passed by the English literary scene. “Insulation generates insularity, and the barriers are not strictly linguistic,” Buford says and he is absolutely right. So what do we get? “The dreadful droning sameness of the contemporary.”

If you have been a regular Granta reader, you will find many repeats here but it is useful to have the best in one place. If you haven’t been one, it is worthwhile to get a copy and know why it is the best literary magazine going today.