Ranking of Literary Journals

I’ve become disenchanted with the whole notion of ranking literary journals, but I don’t want to delete this page entirely and disappoint the many readers who come here daily to discover new literary journals to read and submit to. So instead, I’m radically changing the system. The list below arranges literary journals in order of how many times they’ve had a story or special mention in the last six years (2007 – 2012) in the Best American Short Stories (BASS).

My hope is that this list will complement Cliff Garstand’s excellent list at Perpetual Folly which ranks journals according to Pushcart Prizes over the last decade. To some extent, I’m borrowing his methodology which gives a certain number of points to wins and a lesser number for special mentions (in BASS, these are the 100 notable stories listed at the end of each volume).

This list differs from Marc Watkins list, both in terms of years covered (his covers 2000 – 2007) and also the point system (the same number of points is awarded for special mentions as for appearing in the anthology).

On statistics: statistics is a epistemic methodology prized by our modernistic, science-obsessed world as the primary way to Know Things. The cold hard facts trumps subjective knowledge, right? But I would argue that statistics gives us only a very limited view of the world, and one which necessarily skews “proper” knowledge.

Let me be less philosophical and more practical: Please don’t overestimate the important of the list below. The list below does not tell you whether a journal is good or not, it only tells you whether the BASS editors happened to like the flavor of stories in a journal. That, necessarily, is entirely subjective, and I encourage you to discover for yourself the type of fiction each journal publishes, as well as explore the many excellent journals that don’t appear on this list.

I dislike some “high” level journals and really love “low” level journals. So while my tastes are not necessarily reflected by the list below, that’s good, because it will force you all, my lovely, devoted readers, to form your own judgments. For those of you already deep in the literary journal world, I hope that this list is one aid among many to help you figure out where to submit and subscribe.

Best American Short Story Rankings:

• The New Yorker 131
• Tin House  70
• Ploughshares  44
• Atlantic Monthly  37
• McSweeney’s Quarterly  35
• Harper’s Magazine  29
• Glimmer Train 28
• New England Review  26
• Granta  24
• Paris Review  22
• The Southern Review  22
• American Short Fiction 20
• One Story  19
• Zoetrope All-Story 19
• Antioch Review 15
• The Kenyon Review  14
• Virginia Quarterly Review  13
• AGNI  13
• A Public Space  13
• Conjunctions  12
• The Iowa Review  12
• Narrative Magazine  12
• The Missouri Review  11
• Yale Review  10
• Santa Monica Review  10
• Prairie Schooner  10
• Boulevard  8
• Five Points  8
• Oxford American  8
• Harvard Review  8
• Ecotone  8
• Georgia Review  8
• Alaska Quarterly Review  7
• The Cincinnati Review  7
• The Gettysburg Review  6
• The Sewanee Review  6
• Shenandoah  6
• Black Warrior Review  6
• The Sun  6
• Subtropics  6
• West Branch  6
• Colorado Review  6
• Hobart 6
• Epoch  6
• Fiction  5
• TriQuarterly  5
• Idaho Review  5
• Witness  5
• Mississippi Review  4
• Crazyhorse  4
• Commentary  4
• Michigan Quarterly  4
• Callaloo  3
• The Normal School  3
• StoryQuarterly 3
• Gulf Coast  3
• Joyland Magazine 3
• New Ohio Review 3
• Orion 3
• Fifth Wednesday Journal 3
• American Scholar 3
• Threepenny Review  2
• Esquire  2
• Crab Orchard Review  2
• Commonweal  2
• New Letters  2
• Confrontation  2
• Image  2
• Tampa Review  2
• Massachusetts Review  2
• N+1 2
• Zyzzyva 2