The Seattle Review is overhauling their entire journal, swinging from very short stories (all stories had to be under 4,000 words), to novellas (if it’s not more than 40 pages, they don’t want to see it). They haven’t posted anything on their submissions page yet, but I’ll repost what they mailed me: “The editors of […]
Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and smart phones are not merely new avenues of disseminating fiction. They create new parameters and challenges for fiction to utilize. The medium matters — there is no such thing as a "neutral" medium. The main mistake readers make is believing that the content is transferable between mediums — that a story […]
So these are the journals I got my grubby fingers on and humped back to California in my carry-on backpack. Total # of journals: 18 Total # of pounds lost while carrying them through airport: Unknown, but likely substantial The Sun Blue Mesa Review Crab Orchard Review The Gettysburg Review Third Coast Colorado Review Nimrod […]
"Even esteemed journals sometimes seem like they're run by squirrels, marmots, or lemurs." — Timothy Schaffert At the AWP panel "The Road from Journal to Book," five writers/editors talked about the fiction of literary journal hierarchies. They named Cliff Garstang's Perpetual Folly Pushcart Rankings and the Top 50 Journals by Every Writer's Resource as examples of […]
In the last few years, many prestigious literary journals have moved to a two-tier model for publishing: they maintain their print journal for the big-name authors, and create an online space to publish emerging authors. Granta now has their "New Voices" program, started last year, which publishes new authors online every month. American Short Fiction has […]
Issue #3 of Electric Literature just came out, featuring Aimee Bender and Rick Moody, among others. I got my hands on a copy of the print journal, and I’m glad to see that a journal that touts itself as being available on so many digital platforms hasn’t let the print side languish. It’s a beautiful […]
Ted Genoways, editor of VQR, wrote an impassioned call for action in Mother Jones. Essentially, he laments the decline of the literary journal and the explosion of creative writing programs and writers who don't read. About those writers who don't read: "Last summer, Louis Menand tabulated that there were 822 creative writing programs. Consider this […]
Okay, so let's get the order of events correct. First, Cliff at Perpetual Folly tipped me off to Evanston Now, a local online news source in the Northwestern area (where TriQuarterly is published). Evanston Now reported that the Northwestern University Press, which publishes TriQuarterly, would be scaling back a number of its operations. Mentioned in […]
Thanks to Absinthe Minded (great name, by the way), for referring me to this article in the Goethe Institut about the literary journal/short story scene in Germany. Love the opening: “Like moles, literary magazines burrow through the subsoil and often bring literary treasures to light. They live on self-exploitation, are sometimes short-lived and bizarre, and […]
Here’s John Freeman brilliant description of the role of literary journals: Their primary function, after all, is to undermine this economy of prestige, to promote gross miscegenation, messiness, conflict and disorder; to subvert the market; and to place writers in unexpected places, where they can create their own unlikely community of readers.
