First impressions are good. The design has had a considerable makeover. While still a heavyweight book masquerading as a magazine, a cursory flip through reveals a number of telling changes. Poems. Splashes of red text. URLs to the revamped website. Original artwork. A letters page that seems slightly redundant (fulsome praise and a missive from a subscriber disappointed at the last issue’s late delivery) but certainly something that, judging by the quality of the writing through the rest of the magazine, will turn into a thoroughly useful sounding-off board. Meanwhile, a series of short, sharp observations are collected at the beginning, running no more than a half dozen pages and generally of interest – though I defy anybody to not be irritated by the preening self-impressed garbage about typographic fonts that one-trick pony Douglas Coupland dispenses.

Flash new tricks aside, it is on the quality of its writing that Granta has built a formidable reputation, and judging solely by this issue the future bodes well. The magazine’s guide for non-fiction contributors explicitly states that submissions ‘should outlast [the three-month publishing period] by several years’. Thus we have a quite excellent contribution from Andrew Hussey who revisits the Paris banlieues that bubbled back in 2005.

Rather than the hysterics that some sections of the press reacted with at the time (the Spectator ran a notorious cover predicting the riots were a precursor to the Islamification of Britain), Hussey’s sensitive piece sees him talk to the banlieu residents, gauging the temperature of Paris’ most impoverished residents after a half-year of Sarkozy – who once described the rioters as ‘scum’ – and offering possibly the most valuable English language explication of exactly what the febrile mood within is like.

Similarly fine writing comes from Guardian correspondent Xan Rice, who tells a strange, moving tale of a young pilot (an old school friend of Rice’s) searching for his missing father’s lost plane in the jungle of a civil war-stricken Angola; and with Owen Sheers’ remarkable account of Britain’s Christmas Island H-bomb tests, which illuminates the current discussion about our nuclear weapons stockpiles whilst picking out memorable details – like the harrowing cries of seabirds blinded by the flashpoint. These are accompanied by less gripping, though no less worthwhile, pieces on Beijing’s Olympic construction plans and the murder of London literary agent Tim Lott.

Fiction-wise, things don’t bode so well. Curiously, the short stories here are all by Americans: Annie Proulx, Joshua Ferris and Rick Moody. However, Ferris’ tale of an aged, demented woman bedevilled by critters borne from her imagination fizzes but ultimately fails to go anyplace, while Proulx’s wearying story of retirement home reminisces entices the reader into the narcolepsy that most of her characters suffer from. Moody, however, holds his end up by throwing in a curious, corner-shaped piece, entitled ‘Videos Of The Dead’, that approaches its eponymous topic quite literally before unfolding into a somewhat macabre piece with which Charlie Kaufmann could probably make a decent film.

A fine issue then, well balanced, and a promising beginning for the new editor. Much of the coverage of Granta 101 has highlighted the title’s anachronism in a country that seems to value vacuous celebritism and disdain anything perceived as ‘intellectual’, worrying wondered whether such a ‘highbrow’ title can survive without softening its intimidating stance. Yet surely that is the point: if you can’t find a ‘highbrow’ conversation in a literary magazine like Granta, then we may as well give up, read whatever Richard & Judy tell us to and take out subscriptions to Grazia. Whether Cowley survives in the role or not, long may Granta continue to offer a path out of the creeping mendacity that threatens to overwhelm Britain’s cultural landscape.