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Tomorrow’s Literary Superstars Today
The title of this journal is a geeky math joke, meant to respond to the grad-school induced idea that intellectual history was over. As Marco Roth, one of its editors put it, “We thought, ‘no, there’s plus one.’”
A group of friends who met each other in Harvard undergrad and Yale PhD programs, including novelists Benjamin Kunkel and Keith Gessen, founded the magazine, which includes cultural commentary, reviews, fiction, and poetry that are unapologetically highbrow, in a good way.
Recent issues have included work on current events, like interviews with anonymous hedge-fund managers about the financial collapse, as well as the events of yesteryear, like Wesley Yang’s feature on the Virginia Tech shooter’s troubled relationship with his poems and other writings. The last issue featured a particularly interesting discussion on whether the environmental movement is using the Bush administration’s same fear tactics to scare the world into conservation.
As for the actual literature, it can be edgy. The magazine recently ran an excerpt of a souped-up version of Italo Calvino’s postmodern tome If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, but it was liberally sprinkled with pop-culture references and drug-riddled emails. Plus, it teaches the reader Arabic. The experimental unpublished novel was co-written by novelist Helen DeWitt and Australian journalist Ilya Gridneff.
From thoughts on Roberto Bolano to fiction from Tashkent, read these blurbs from n+1.
Subscribe to n + 1.
The Believer offers fascinating cultural detritus, including reviews and poetry as well as deliberately untimely features and interviews of uncommon depth.
Vendela Vida, Heidi Julavits and Ed Park met in the mid-1990s at Columbia's MFA program and founded The Believer in 2003 to highlight overlooked authors and give writers, musicians, philosophers and ninjas the chance to talk about their work while not on tour for their most recent projects.
Their first issue gained them a bevy of followers for an essay criticizing the snark of book reviews in the New York Times and elsewhere, and for an interview with Jack White of the White Stripes that explored his early career as an upholsterer.
Design buffs love the ‘zine for its cover artwork by graphic novelist Charles Burns, and its thick beige paper gives it a delightful feel in the hands.
Offering nine issues a year, three of them themed double-issues focusing on film, music or art, The Believer is the place to find reviews of overlooked books, features on infiltrating anarchist training camps, and interviews with legendary writers and editors like Gordon “Captain Fiction” Lish.
Read this rant, The Curse of the Spurned Hippie, by Steven G. Kellman
Subscribe to The Believer.
Subtropics is the most traditional literary magazine on this list. A young anthology-style magazine put out by the University of Florida and helmed by novelist and short-story writer David Leavitt, Subtropics has managed to distinguish itself by the quality of its work.
The journal began with a bang, featuring work by famed writers John Barth, Harold Bloom, Ariel Dorfman, and Les Murray in its first issue (Winter/Spring 2006).
Leavitt says there’s nothing like publishing a writer he’s just discovered though, like James Magruder’s short story in the current issue, which is about two boys’ doomed efforts to build a sugar cube version of Tenochtitlan. There’s a wide variety of poetry, from Jehanne Dubrow’s verses, written in the persona of “nonexistent” Yiddish poet Ida Lewin, to Denise Duhamel and Sandy McIntosh’s poem “237 More Reasons to Have Sex” (reason 156: “A Kawasaki wasn’t enough to help me through my mid-life crisis.").
Although you can’t find much current content for this magazine online, here is a short piece from an older issue.
Subscribe to Subtropics.
Lizzie Stark is a freelance journalist who has written for the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Daily Beast. She also edits the lit-mag Fringe and is at work on a narrative nonfiction book about Live Action Role Play, or LARP.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Amateur Hour at the White House
Leslie H. Gelb, a former New York Times columnist and senior government official, is author of Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (HarperCollins 2009), a book that shows how to think about and use power in the 21st century. He is president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Going Rogue: The Index
Christopher Buckley's books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and is editor-at-large of ForbesLife magazine. His new book is Losing Mum and Pup, a memoir. Buckley's Daily Beast column is the winner of an Online Journalism Award in the category of Online Commentary.
Haute McNuggets
Lizzie Stark is a freelance journalist who has written for the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Daily Beast. She also edits the lit-mag Fringe and is at work on a narrative nonfiction book about Live Action Role Play, or LARP.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Jerk
Lizzie Stark is a freelance journalist who has written for the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Daily Beast. She also edits the lit-mag Fringe and is at work on a narrative nonfiction book about Live Action Role Play, or LARP.
Tom Robbins Meets the Beer Fairy
Lizzie Stark is a freelance journalist who has written for the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Daily Beast. She also edits the lit-mag Fringe and is at work on a narrative nonfiction book about Live Action Role Play, or LARP.
The Believer is the apogee of self-congratulatory irrelevance. It has fallen far and fast since the days of the great Jack White interview about upholstery.
I'm a bit befuddled by the insinuation that The Missouri Review found Naguib Mahfouz. He would have been well known by 1985 (he had published since the 1930s!), but perhaps he was not well known in the US, when the Missouri Review "found" him.
More and more and more and more tired old ABM's. NOT antiballistic missile . Arrogant Book Mafia. Give me a break. Can't we find SOMEONE NEW to write about. Same old yadayadayada crowd aren't they sparkling.
No. -- Tim Barrus, Some Marijuana Coffee Shop, Amsterdam http://le-too.blogspot.com
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