Writing about literary magazines in 1930, Ezra Pound noted that “The work of writers who have emerged in or via such magazines outweighs in permanent value the work of the writers who have not emerged in this manner. The history of contemporary letters has, to a very manifest extent, been written in such magazines.” Such a pronouncement is equally true of the present: many of our finest contemporary writers made their debuts in these “little magazines,” and many continue to publish new and exciting work in these publications.
Travis Kurowski, one of the foremost scholars of this literary world, posits in Paper Dreams that “literary magazines, due to their subject matter and even the smallness of their production,” might “create a somehow more significant and longer lasting community than larger circulation magazines and newspapers.” Online and print literary magazines capture and document the literary moment.
Editors serve an essential role in that process. My years of working with editors as a contributor have taught me that they are passionate, discerning stewards. It is often a thankless job to cull through thousands of submissions and deliver far more rejections than acceptances. Yet editors love the opportunity to make discoveries, to champion work, to shape and finally share an issue with readers.
Since they are so devoted to their publications, I asked editors of seven great literary magazines to select their favorite issues. Here are their choices.
1. Poetry – Don Share, editor – February 1931
Like any editor, I’m humbly obliged to feel that the best issue of Poetry is the one I’m working on now, but literary history tends not only to humble, but lay low, most editors: think Thomas Wentworth Higginson, somehow failing to publish Emily Dickinson. So my choice will have to be our so-called “Objectivists” issue of February 1931. It was guest-edited for Harriet Monroe by Louis Zukofsky. Zukofsky had been a contributor since 1924, and at Ezra Pound’s urging (they’d met in 1927), Harriet agreed to let Zuk put together an issue of the magazine. It became something of an albatross for him later (apologies for that metaphor), but the issue was a great success for Poetry. Featuring such later luminaries as Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, George Oppen, Basil Bunting, William Carlos Williams, and Kenneth Rexroth, among others, it became a kind of blueprint for Anglo-American modernist poetry; and “objectivism” is in all the literary history books now. An unfortunate and conspicuous aspect of this is how white and male the table of contents is. Still, it was our most influential issue. Despite its indisputably legendary status, it also featured work seldom spoken of today: a poem by Whittaker Chambers, who would become infamous later with the Alger Hiss trials; a long-forgotten Imagist poem by Martha Champion, who was a student at the University of Wisconsin; and a statement on poetry by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler so mystifying and obscure that it required a further statement by Zuk and then a rebuttal to that from Ford and Tyler; alas, it’s been that way for poetry ever since. Above all, I love Zukofsky’s frustrated account of the editorial process, for as it turns out, there was no such thing as objectivism:
“Harriet Monroe at the time insisted, we’d better have a title for it, call it something. I said, I don’t want to. She insisted; so, I said, alright, if I can define it in an essay, and I used two words, sincerity and objectification, and I was sorry immediately. But it’s gone down into the history books; they forgot the founder, thank heavens, and kept the terms, and, of course, I said objectivist, and they said objectivism and that makes all the difference. Well, that was pretty bad, so then I spent the next thirty years trying to make it simple.”
Most Poetry readers will have heard of Pound’s dictum to “make it new,” but in reality, this issue of the magazine may well have taught many the virtue of keeping it simple.
2. West Branch – G.C. Waldrep, editor – Spring/Summer 2015
One issue! So hard, even in the handful of years since I took over West Branch in 2011 — all the children are exceptional, and all of them are deeply-loved. That said: for me, one of the joys of putting together an issue of a journal is trying to imagine lines of coherence between, across, and among different works. I spend hours ordering each issue, thinking about these lines, imagining how different works interact with one another. In that sense, my current favorite is WB 78. This issue was, for me, grounded in two great short stories — Benjamin Parzybok’s “News of the Week” and Victor Robert Lee’s “Border Control.” They’re very different, but each time I read them I feel a slug of adrenaline enter my system, and I feel extraordinarily honored to have been the one who brought them to a wider audience. Each is obsessed with the gaps in desire — the dead zones in which desire, through its absence, bides its time. There are other echoes throughout the issue: Parzybok’s taxidermied gorilla echoed in Charlie Clark’s poem “Elegy to a Black Bear Head Poorly Stuffed and Mounted;” the body augmented by damage in Patrick Roscoe’s dreamy story “Beggars” and Roxane Gay’s “Ugly Love,” and again in Brian D. Morrison’s poem “A History of Biting Circa 1599.” Kasey Erin Phifer-Byrne’s circus poems imagine fire-eating, lion-taming as more ways the body expresses its own insufficiency. “I can / look away from you whenever I want,” Corey Van Landingham’s speaker asserts in “Exegesis” — but in the end (of the following poem, and otherwise), it’s the irreducible body of the other, its incompletion, its hunger: “To drink the same milk as a boy / in the city, never considering his mouth.” His mouth, like the white polar bear you can no longer not imagine. Yes.
3. The Iowa Review – Jenna Hammerich, deputy managing editor – Fall 2009
My favorite issue of The Iowa Review is our Fall 2009 river-themed issue. In 2008, the Iowa River and its tributaries flooded so badly that FEMA pronounced 85 of Iowa’s 99 counties disaster areas. As a nation, it seems, we tend to use our rivers and forget them, though they’re as essential to our identities as they are to our ecosystems. As our then-editor David Hamilton put it, “We all tend toward belonging to a river.” A collection of carefully curated essays, stories, poems, drawings, and photos of/about rivers, our Fall 2009 issue offers “our representation of River.” In it, artists and scholars from across the country consider rivers’ environmental, industrial, and psychological importance, their various histories and roles in our lives, and the lamentable condition of so many of them. Frederic Will, Fleda Brown, Laura Sayre, and David Wagoner elegize/analyze the rivers in their lives; Amy Leach and Ashleigh Pedersen imagine new rivers, new responses; Anat Pick articulates a river via sound poetry. I’ve never learned so much from one of our issues or been so grateful to have had a hand in publishing it.
4. New England Review – Carolyn Kuebler, editor – Summer 2015
I’ve never been comfortable with the word “best,” but I can’t resist the chance to think about what would make one issue of New England Review better than another, or at least to say what makes an issue — any issue — good. Better. Best. “The China issue,” as we call it around the office, comes to mind both for aspirational reasons and for what it turned out to be. We aspire to publishing more international writing, in a more deliberate way, and putting together this issue taught me how to do that; but it also taught me how, despite their obvious similarities, the China-related writings were just as varied and fit just as well (often better) with their English-language neighbors as with each other. In Vol. 36, #2, Summer 2015, we published reverent, mysterious poems in translation by Ya Shi that seemed to speak intimately with poems by David Baker and Bruce Bond. More politically edged poems by Xiao Kaiyu complemented Wendy Willis’s thoughtful essay about the artist Ai Weiwei, which paved the way for Jeff Staiger’s brainy David Foster Wallace critique. Yin Lichuan’s pop sensibility closed out the issue on the heels of Michael X. Wang’s short fiction about a rural Chinese village, its straight-shooting storytelling power reflecting that of Ed Skoog’s unsettling poem, which preceded it. An essay by the inimitable Marianne Boruch about, as she says, “poetry as diagnosis,” deepened the conversation inwardly, while Camille Dungy’s essay about a trip to Maine showed us how the most superficial of kindnesses reveal something of our racial history. Now, looking back on the “China issue,” I marvel at how it also includes a high-voltage story by Steve de Jarnatt, subtle and gorgeous fiction by Carla Panciera and Sharon Solwitz, James Naremore’s thoughts on Orson Welles at 100, and haunting love poems — if they can even be called that — by Kazim Ali and Vandana Khanna. So, yes, 36.2. Now that was an issue.
5. Brevity – Dinty W. Moore, editor – Fall 2015
It is of course excruciatingly difficult to pick out one favorite issue after 18.5 years, and the truth is, usually the upcoming issue is the real favorite, the one that the editors are most excited about. That’s how it should be, if the magazine is thriving and growing. But to say “the next issue is my favorite” would be a cop-out, so I’ll pick our 50th issue, from Fall 2015, for a few excellent reasons: (1) The issue features two of our most frequent contributors, Rebecca McClanahan and Diane Seuss (and they are frequent because they rock words); (2) We finally snagged a writer I’ve long admired, River Teeth editor Joe Mackall, after years of begging him to send something along; (3) The issue is truly international with work by Shahnaz Habib, an Indian writer eating in a Yemeni restaurant, Lina Ferreira, born and raised in Bogota, Colombia, Cary Tennis of Salon fame, now living full-time in France, and Matthew Komatsu, an American but writing about his stint in Afghanistan; and finally (4) All the work is solid, surprising, and strong.
6. Tin House – Rob Spillman, editor – Fall 2007
How can you possibly have a favorite amongst your children? In my case, 67 children or issues of Tin House? The most fun and rewarding, though, might have to be Issue #33, in the Fall of 2007, called “Fantastic Women.” It sprung out of conversations I had with Rick Moody, where we tried to grasp a certain moment we were noticing, that there was something going on with women writers who were pushing the speculative envelope, that their work was distinct from their male colleagues, weirder, more hybrid. I enlisted Moody to help us put together an issue completely devoted to these women (still the only issue of Tin House that has had a guest co-editor). We were blown away by the contributions. It was a thrill to unleash fierce new work by writers like Aimee Bender, Kate Bernheimer, Lucy Corin, Julia Elliott, Samantha Hunt, Shelley Jackson, Stacey Levin, Kelly Link, Lydia Millet, Alissa Nutting, Stacey Richter, and Julia Slavin. It is still one of our most talked-about issues, and one we have subsequently anthologized and expanded into book form.
7. Shenandoah – RT Smith, editor – Spring/Fall 2010
Since a group of Washington and Lee students, including one T.K. Wolfe, founded Shenandoah in 1950, the magazine has published over 200 issues, either in paper or online, so it’s nearly impossible even to contrive a method for selecting the “best” issue — the one with a Seamus Heaney essay? the Ha Jin story? the Native American issue? issues with James Merrill poems or Marianne Moore poems? the issue featuring Richard Wilbur’s essay “Poetry and Happiness?” Instead, I’ve simply chosen my personal favorite, Volume 60, Number 1-2, perhaps due to the work involved and the pleasure I have derived from editing it and re-reading it.
The Spring/Fall issue of 2010 is a bright red, perfect-bound book of 264 pages adorned with a print of Barry Moser’s woodcut “Mrs. Cope’s Nemesis,” an illustration for the story “A Circle in the Fire.” Inscribed in yellow are “60th Anniversary Issue” and “A Tribute to Flannery O’Connor.”
Not all the 20 poems are as directly Flannery-related as Claudia Emerson’s trio of character portraits (of Red Sam, LucyNell and Hulga) or Rita Mae Reese’s “Apocrypha: Flannery and the Book of Tobit,” but verse by Rodney Jones, Charles Wright, Dave Smith, and Betty Adcock fan the flames of gothic wit and regionally-sown universality.
And there’s much more to savor — Flannery essays biographical, theological, geographical, anecdotal, and feminist; fiction (by Ron Rash and Joyce Carol Oates) directly referential to the Georgia’s National Book Award-winning Flannery, as well as more obliquely related narratives (by Starkey Flythe, Fred Chappell, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers), photos of the O’Connor farm Andalusia, cartoons, collages, letters from the peacock-loving author to Shenandoah editors.
And I wouldn’t want anyone to miss LaWanda Walters verse homage “Piano Legs,” which brings Glenn Gould and Johann Sebastian Bach to “Good Country People” and the Misfit in that infamous parrot shirt. Nor Marlon Barton’s moving story “Pasture Art,” which is a visceral account of human suffering and the wishful near-miracle of “a hay dragon spitting red-tin fire” to animate and complete a collection of folk art.
No one could bring to the mysteries of airy nothingness a local habitation and a name better than O’Connor, but those who have followed the trail she blazed have kept the spirit alive, and this issue of Shenandoah, I think, has done a respectable job of compiling and packaging some of the artifacts. Fortunately, we still have 50 or 60 copies for sale.
Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin: I admit, I haven’t read the novel, but I love the movie, starring the bewitching Mia Farrow. I have purposely kept my blonde hair very short these last 8 and a half months because I appreciate the cinematic allusion, though I have one friend in particular who urged me, early on, to grow out my locks. “It’s not funny!” she said. “What kind of message are you sending?” How about this: Every pregnant woman wonders, at least once, if she’s got the devil’s spawn growing inside of her.
The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell: This is the next novel I’m going to read, despite my sister Heidi’s warnings that I should wait until after my baby’s born. O’Farrell’s novel, which my sister could not put down, and which made her sob at its ending, follows two stories–one about a woman in post-war London, and one about contemporary parents in that same city. There’s apparently some childbirth trauma. Lots of blood, my sister said. She also told me to avoid Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks. The deaths–deaths, plural--in this novel still haunt her.
An Exact Replica of a Figure of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken: Every morning I awake to the spine of this powerful and painful memoir, which I chose as one of my favorite books of 2008. It sits on the shelf by my bed, right next to Nox by Anne Carson and Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. (That’s a lot of death to wake up to, I realize). McCracken’s story of raising a child after the stillbirth of her first is all the more terrifying and moving because it’s true, and because she speaks of trauma and grief in a distinct, unflinching, and sometimes even funny way. I keep wondering if this book might mean more to me on a second read, now that I am pregnant, now that I know firsthand what I could lose, what and whom I would mourn. Such a book reminds me not to take this time in my life lightly; it reminds me that I’m already a mother.
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver: Shriver’s brilliant and dark novel is narrated by Eva, whose son Kevin is guilty of carrying out a Columbine-style high school killing. It’s a grim but often very funny narrative of maternal ambivalence, and it’s certainly a mind-fuck for any mom-to-be. Eva articulates every single dark thought a pregnant woman would be wise to avoid (For instance: “What if my child grows up to be a murderer?” And, “What if I don’t love him?”). Here’s a taste of the sharp prose, most likely to be left out of the highly-anticipated film adaptation with Tilda Swinton, due out this fall:
Geek Love. I tried to read this when I was pregnant and had to put it down.
here’s one but it’s not necessarily one to avoid, Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas by James Patterson. A heartwarming story of a pregnant woman’s diary to her unborn son. It’s a departure from the genre that Patterson usually writes.
It is a VERY good book and not just about the story itself, but life too in how we’re juggling so many balls hoping not to let one drop.
enjoy!
I had the same experience last year when I was pregnant with my son. I defiantly read PURGE by Sofi Oksanen after several people told me I just couldn’t read it while pregnant. And I found it profoundly unsettling in a very unpleasant way, just as they’d feared. So I made quite a reading list after that of “books I’ll read when I’m no longer pregnant.”
What everyone failed to mention to me was that if a book is too disturbing for a pregnant woman to read, it will almost certainly be too disturbing for the mother of a newborn (who has very little time for reading anyway). I read THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE shortly after my son’s birth, and O’Farrell’s decription of the frighenting, drug-addled days following a traumatic birth is spot on. It’s a tremendous book that, while devastatingly sad, never made me feel anxious about my new status as a mother. Much like ROOM (which I read when I was 39 weeks pregnant), It made me feel invigorated, determined to be as strong and resilient as the mothers in it. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ll ever read WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN now. I just can’t bring myself to pick it up.
I reread Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child periodically, and although I’ve never conceived, it never fails to terrify me.
My baby is six weeks old, and while pregnant, I read the McCracken, the O’Farrell, and the Cusk you mention above. Ha! I also read the Shriver about six months before I got pregnant; that one stays with you, every time you get a bad blow to the ribs.
I also read: War and Peace (the charming mustachioed princess dies in childbirth!); Half Baked (one baby dies, one is born at 24 weeks and struggles for life in the NICU); Every Last One (almost all her babies die!) and Jacob de Zoet (some pretty horrifying childbirth/child sacrifice material). Soon after giving birth I read Sue Miller’s The Good Mother, and right now I’m deeply in the midst of Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field, both of which are heavy lifting.
I say pooh to Little Earthquakes and all the light fuzzy chicky mom lit. You’re already in deep. You may as well read your way through the worst of it.
Fay Weldon’s She May Not Leave broke me. Eastern European nanny seduces away father in slinky, insidious way with an awful, awful, bleach-my-brain-please scene in last 20 pages.
I read The Road when I was nine months pregnant. BIG mistake. I love Rachel Cusk–glad you mentioned her. Her “A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother” is one I would suggest for after the baby is born.
I would stay from Joy William’s “The Changeling.” It’s a horrifying book, Pearl, a young mother drinking gin and tonic after gin and tonic, after her failed attempt at escape from a sinister island. And her baby, who turns out to be a mother’s greatest nightmare. A scary, scary child. It’s also a remarkable, wonderful book, and I’m really happy that the Fairy Tale Review Press put it back into print.
Agree completely about WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. I read it in January, way behind the curve, and it blew my mind. Lionel Shriver is so brilliant I don’t care how disturbing the book is. (Although I can’t say I wish I’d been pregnant while reading it…)
I remember being pregnant with my second son and my husband rented the movie Gallipoli (which PJ Harvey sings about in her beautiful, haunting new record about WW1) and I was TRAUMATIZED. But I was not a tough pregnant lady in general- I was super delicate emotionally. Oddly, I don’t remember books being a problem, but I also don’t remember many things. I remember reading Map Of The World (Jane Hamiltion?) when my sons were babies and it didn’t bother me -the dead child part–but it did bother me “politically”. That said, it was deeply engrossing.
I love this post Edan! The other-people-worried-for-you during pregnancy is so true. But really, I could have gotten used to all those pints of ice cream…
Soon after August was born I read Skippy Dies. I felt worse about the title than any other aspect of the book and it definitely drew some funny looks from people.
5 weeks left for you and Patrick? How exciting, enjoy them (but only from a sitting down, legs up position with a pint of ice cream in your hand)!
Totally second the Joy Williams comment. Same for State of Grace. She is so, so, so good, though.
Thanks for all these great suggestions–there’s a lot to dig into here..
Yep, Lauren, now I only have 4 more weeks..!
Add “The Chronology of Water” by Lidia Yuknavitch to that list.
Sophie’s choice.
Nightmares for weeks while pregnant.
I didn’t read it while pregnant, but I think if I attempted White Oleander while pregnant, there might be dire consequences!
Oh thank you thank you thank you for this! I am due next week, and while I’ve stuck mostly to sci-fi and other lighter fiction throughout my pregnancy, I very much appreciate the spirit in which your article was written.
In fact this might be my new mantra: “Because I feel as normal as can be expected when you’re growing a human being inside of you, I’ve noticed that other people experience anxiety for me.” So true! And SO much worse this close to my due date… no wonder all I’ve been doing is reading as the big day gets closer! Thank goodness for escapism.
The Misconceivers.
The Handmaid’s Tale.
You may also want to stay away from Joanna Kavenna’s “The Birth of Love,” although it’s fantastic. The long description of the beginnings of labor might be a bit much for you.
And don’t even go near the nonfiction. I read the title “Pushed” while I was pregnant and it got me all worked up–mostly with righteous indignation toward doctors. And, arguably, you need doctors while you’re pregnant, so that’s no time to be feeling crankypants toward them.
I second Doris Lessing’s Fith Child – it should right up there in the list. Also, Chuck Palahniuk’s books must not be fun to read if you’re battling morning sickness…
Midwives, by Chris Bohjalian
It’s a good book, and I would recommend it to anyone who is NOT pregnant. The night before I went to the hospital to have an induced labor for my 13-day-late firstborn, I read this book. I knew it would be disturbing, and it was, yet I could not put it down.
It was a very long, tough labor – overseen by my least favorite of the three nurse-midwives whom I had seen throughout the pregnancy. My delivery had a better outcome than the one described in the book, but I still haven’t been able to read it again, even 11 years later.
What I Thought I Knew by Alice Eve Cohen. Memoir of an unexpected and traumatic pregnancy with extreme medical complications, the contemplation of late-stage abortion, and the outcome of all this.
I’m coming a bit late to this, but THE HOTTEST DISHES OF THE TARTAR CUISINE is one that you might consider avoiding. I heard a reading of it by the translator, in which the narrator tries several gruesome methods of inducing miscarriage in her simple-minded daughter. (I’d just found out I was pregnant and had to excuse myself to get the nausea under control.)
Other than that though, I salute the act of the freedom to read whatever you want when you’re pregnant. It’s easy to be superstitious about this stuff (I’m susceptible!), but there’s no reason we shouldn’t have deep literary experiences even while being a bit delicate with our bodies. Thanks for this piece!
I wasn’t pregnant when i read it, but The Obscene Bird of Night is the most horrific book i’ve ever read and i never want to read it again, but i’ll never forget it. Rosemary’s Baby is actually a novel i have at home but haven’t read yet! i’m almost 20 weeks :)
Don’t read The Time travellers Wife. I read it in early pregnancy and there seemed to be endless miscarriages with lots of descriptions of blood