LITERARY MAGAZ,INES

http//thefastertimes.com/fiction/2010/04/27/a-new-literary-magazine-ranking


This is a quite nifty and intelligent attempt to do the impossible.

It started out as a ranking and then became a list. In the earlier version, TRoL managed to be in the fifth tier, which I guess you might call the Honorable Mentions. In the subsequent listing, we are still there.

The author's criteria for selection seem to me sound, at least in part, the question being 'If you were a writer, to whom should you try to flog your merchandise?' The objective of most writers being to get themselves published, notice and (possibly) paid, there are an awful number of variables in the mix, but this is an honest attempt to give advice.

Here are some thoughts on the subject:

1. I don't think Pushcart or O.Hara awards are a sound basis for scoring. I know I wince when I have to send copies to Pushcart, though their hearts are undoubtedly in the right place. At best, publication in Pushcarft (and yes, we have won some, I think), is a sign of competence: not of originality or significance. As for O. Hara, I pass. I know nothing about it.

2. The fundamental error is that the list of magazines is parochial. TRoL is an international magazine. We publish the best literature we can find. Oddly enough, it's been some time since America led in the field, so we have to find mss among the French, the Italians, the Poles, the Russians, the Latin Americans and so on. Most of the magazines listed are pretty monoglot.

3. There is a generational gap among magazines, which is related to circulation, location, gossip and trivia. TRoL is my ninth magazine, and when I look back over a sixty-year career in the field, I think I can safely say that the anthology (Saul Bellow & Keith Botsford: Editors, available from the Toby Press) of this magazine and its predecessors, is ample evidence of our quality. But we are probably not as up to date as some. We just do our work. We don't Facebook or Twitter.

4. There are also peculiarities to TRoL which go unacknowledged in such a listing. We are the ONLY magaz,ine I know of that will publish texts up to book-length; we are the ONLY magazine that consistently revisits, in the Archives section, literature that has been forgotten or unjustly neglected.

5. The purpose of the listing is weighted towards magazines to which writers should submit. We are committed to publishing a magazine in which the intelligent Reader, be he writer or not, can find a sense of discovery.

6. It needs also to be said that in the magazines listed, some are commercial, and most are subsidized. TRoL owes nothing to anyone. We don't have 'student' readers, or juries to select what gets published. We don't apply for grants. One old man does all the work and foots the bill. I guess that makes us, however estimable, relicts.

LITERARY SQUABBLES

Friends send me links to the small wars insistently being waged on the many battlefields of literature. One such received yesterday revealed -- shock! horror! -- that the editor of Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR), one Ted Genoways (an old Immigration mis-hearing of Genovese?) had published his own work, that there are subsidies involved, and that he is grossly overpaid (any editor who is paid at all is overpaid is my opinion) because he is a buddy of higher-ups at the University of Virginia. The link was to a pleasant site belonging to the West Coast magazine Zyzzyva, http://Zyzzivaspeaks.blogspot.com/2008/09/ted-genoways-inserts-himself.html.

I can't say I'm a regular reader of the VQR, nor of its editor's poetry. To the specifics of the case I am therefore blind -- though aroused to hear that this editorial machinery is supported in the five-zero range by that illustrious university. Mr. G. may be a good poet or he may be a bad one; the principle is the same. Editors can do as they damned please. But is this editor the fons et origo of his journal? or has he a master, the university? If the latter, he can only do as he damned pleases if he doesn't offend his master.

Now, largely speaking, universities and university presses are gentle if reluctant masters. All sorts of universities have both magazines and presses, and if they were not intellectual softies, it's hard to beieve that their publications departments -- always expensive and hugely overstaffed -- would survive. Where in this hard world of ours would a real press exist, were it not in the cozy confines of the Academy? I consider it one of the great achievements of John Silber at Boston University to have stonewalled any attempt to create such a press, though he did pass over a couple of journals such as Agni. It is likely that having once been defrauded by the late William Phillips into acquiring what was left of the Partisan Review, he didn't wish to be bitten a second time. And Agni never had more than a modest subsidy -- nothing like the VQR.

What I find especially picturesque about VQR lies in the notion that literary magazines require editorial "staff time', peer reviews, or what the Kenyon Review 's editor sententiously calls an "Editorial Tree". How many editors does it take to 'edit' a poet?

I just don't see how anyone would be startled by the ambiguities of Mr. Genoway's publishing himself. All good editors who are also writers write in their magazines. It is an essential part of their functions. Readers and subscribers are entitled to know how qualified the editor is to pass judgment on what they are given to read. If he should happen to express a fancy for one of the current voltigeurs -- say a Paul Auster -- tant pis, too bad. The high wire is a tricky place for literary toddlers. It isn't as though literary log-rolling were anything new: the Scratch Principle works up and down the literary ladder. That's how writers plan their rise, while other writers plan their rivals' fall.

Number 20, TRoL

1.xii.09

With issue Number 20, TRoL will appear in a new, more slender format, but also more frequently. The magazine which Saul Bellow and I created some ten years ago has always been irregular, which is no doubt the despair of libraries; but we saw no point in binding ourselves to appearing with monotonous regularity when we could not guarantee that we had sufficient material of the kind we wanted. The title included -24the words 'News from', the idea being that we would constantly be bringing readers to see all sorts of texts they would not otherwise see.

That, in turn, was based on the seventeenth century Republic of Letters. Then, if you were a writer or scholar and were traveling, say, from Dublin to Bologna, by tucking the review under your arm, you were assured of a warm welcome wherever you went: you brought news with you and could gather fresh news from its citizens abroad. That remains of the essence. Which is why we have halved the magazine's size and will now appear when we have 16-24 pages of first class texts. As of writing, we can and will bring out four issues in the next few months.

We shall be fair to our subscribers: if you signed on for four, you will get six.

I hear many complaints that we are unobtainable in the local B&N, Borders and so on. Such indeed is the case, and there are reasons for it: it's a pointless exercise. First, because these supermarkets are among the chief culprits for the now well-advanced demise of literature in the market place. Second, they are not interested in selling such magazines as ours. Third, they pulp. Fourth, they often demand payment for placement. In fact, their view of literature dxtends as far as the required reading for the local college.

We are available at Gotham in New York, Seminary in Chicago, City Lights in San Francisco, John Sandoe in London, Casetti in Rome and a few other places.