On this lovely Monday morning, I’d like to direct your attention to the left column, under “Pages.” I’ve added a new one: Ranking of Literary Journals. Although I realize the dangers of such an attempt and the impossibility of creating a list that will not be debated, I wrote this because when I was first starting to send out to literary journals, I wanted a guide to help steer me.
Unfortunately, other than a top-eleven list or two, there isn’t much out there. So this list should help you to know when you’re sending out to one of the most difficult journals, and also know it if you’re sending to a mid-list journal. There are multiple strategies out there — break in at the lower levels and build your way up, or pound away at the big boys until a story breaks through — but I’ll leave those choices up to you.
This list of the top literary journals is not meant to be exhaustive. Actually, the opposite: it’s meant only to highlight drugs online great journals and create a hierarchy of the best journals. It excludes online literary journals because I have ranked them elsewhere. Some of the sections (especially IV and V) have very little differences in status between them. The most incomplete list is section V, which could have twenty or thirty more journals added, and there is space for a section VI, but it would include a good hundred or more journals. Consult Duotrope for those options.
My ranking criteria included perceived reputation, frequency of appearances in literary news, appearances in newly published collections, my personal experience with these journals, other ranking attempts and Duotrope rankings. Although the actual list is broken down into sections based on the difficult of getting published, this is just a convenient way of smashing all the above criteria into one easy-to-label format. Also, in ranking these journals, I tried to evaluate their current status, not (if applicable) their former glory.
If you have suggestions or critiques, I welcome them in the comments section of that page.
2 comments
Those aren’t literary journals; they’re literary magazines. Entirely different thing. Literary magazines publish literature; literary journals publish articles about literature. (Well, they used to. Now they publish “cultural studies.”)
In the lit world, we pretend lit mags and lit journals are interchangeable.