Dead White Magazines

At 192 pages, Monkeybicycle 8 is a healthy selection of prose and poetry of impressive range. Rarely am I introduced to a print publication through its online version, but my previous reading experiences with Monkeybicycle have been focused on their more truncated works, including the archived flash fiction and the addicting One Sentence Story feature.

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BOMB magazine has been publishing conversations between artists, writers, actors, directors, and musicians since 1981. It is where art and culture collide to provide the most intimate, raw, and scarily real portraits of this and the last century’s most influential people. Issue 114 / Winter 2010 most exemplifies this magazine’s mission. From beginning to end,

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I read the latest, Thurston Moore designed, issue of Zoetrope All-Story (vol. 14 no. 4) yesterday evening while my daughter was at basketball practice. It’s a short issue themed largely around violence and crime. A story by Etgar Keret about the fate of the lies we tell (as opposed to the fate of the liars who

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What makes an object, a practice, a custom, or a movement defunct? When its use value has been exhausted? Or when its emissaries have abandoned it for something else? These are just a few of the questions Defunct, a new literary magazine, raises. In his essay Sum of Zero, Chris Offutt writes about the defunct

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The Summer 2010 issue of the Colorado Review has bold streaks and brushed hints of hyper-glow tinting on the cover. There’s a carnival tent and a menacing sky in dull greys and faded peaches. I find it eerie. As if it’s suggesting something playful is going on, but beware: the thunder’s coming. Looming cover aside,

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There is a thrilling new story from Jim Shepard in the newest Zoetrope: All-Story. The story—”The Track of the Assassins“—is not unlike much of Shepard’s recent short fiction: slowly-revealed characters lodged in alluring moments in history. The setting of “Assassins” is the 20th century Iraqi and Irani deserts, where Freya Stark searches for Alamut, ancient

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Every year I buy the new Pushcart Prize anthology, eager to read the best work that was published in the previous year, and hoping that one day one of my own stories might find its way into its pages. I’d never thought much about how it worked, but this is what I always assumed: an

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At the tail end of Virginia Quarterly Review editor Ted Genoways’s infamous (at least in some circles) Mother Jones essay about literary magazines, “The Death of Fiction,” Genoways pleads for contemporary short story writers to: Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ’s sake,

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Standing rabbits grace the wraparound cover of The Tusculum Review volume 6, their recent poetry prize issue. Ralph Slatton’s pen-and-ink drawing on the front and back of the issue is complimented by a five print set inside the magazine, enigmatic representations of creatures encapsulated by thick branches and ropes. Slatton’s work is a preface for

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Dear Open City— Please publish fewer stories written by post-MFA academics living in New York City.  I still love you, but I’m getting tired. Thank you, Mary Miller 1. Bitter Open City is one of two literary magazines that I currently subscribe to, and it’s a magazine in which I’ve always dreamed of having my

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