Over the past weeks, we have been informed of at least three nationally acclaimed university literary magazines facing possible termination in the recent future: The Southern Review (via Nola.com), New England Review (via Poets and Writers), and Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing (via Terrain.org). Virginia Quarterly Review editor Ted Genoways has written strongly on the VQR blog on the problems these and other magazines are having in the new publishing landscape—part I is here and part II here. (An observation: Luna Park has written at one time or another about all of the above magazines, not out of any favor towards them, but because all have at some time (many times, really) greatly contributed to the world of literature, both in areas of preservation and discovery.)

At least part of the problem is the usual one: All of these magazine have no doubt a vastly greater number of people desiring to be published in their pages than they have readers willing to financially support their endeavors. So it is the usual plea: Support your local literary magazine. And in today's connected world that magazine can be from Hong Kong to Pittsburgh, online or off. In a recent pledge drive for A Public Space, writer Wells Tower contextualized the plea quite nicely, which I quote below verbatim:

There are, right now, flocks of manila envelopes flying through our airspace, containing poems and stories that could change your life. But the troubling thing, for all of us who believe in the power of good writing, is that if these envelopes do not bear return addresses from brand-name literary agencies or well-known authors, there are, unfortunately, very few first-rate publications willing to give them a second glance.

My first stories made it into print not through the efforts of an agent or a publishing house, but because the slush pile readers at an independent literary magazine took the time to open the manila envelope I'd sent, unbidden, and to read the work according to its merit rather than the cachet of the writer's name. Many of the writers whose work I cherish would have remained unknown if literary magazines like A Public Space had not fostered them at the start of the careers.

By editing and publishing not-yet-known literary talent alongside familiar names, the staff of A Public Space does us a great favor. They not only bring us exceptional essays, poems and stories: they discover and nourish literary artists whose work we'll be reading decades from now. But the publishing climate is difficult, these days especially...

What Tower doesn't mention, is the great writing such magazines bring to the table, writing that largely is not found anywhere else. The stasis-inducing, let-me-read-this-to-you, writing. Tower's early stories were some of that writing for me, in issues of The Paris Review I read standing up in the university library. Here's a more recent example, an excerpt from Daniel Alarcon's Latin America issue of Zoetrope All-Story—from the mesmerizing story "At the Table" by Inés Bortagaray, translated by Idra Novey:

The tablecloth is white. It covers all four corners of this large wooden table placed at the end of the yard, and is so long it brushes the floor. On top of the tablecloth are plates, serving dishes, spoons, ladles, knives, napkins, forks, bottles, jars, flowers, and bits of bread. We sit around it, the united family—everyone sitting along this giant table that extends across two plots of land, ours and that of the others, the relatives. We aren't as noisy as an Italian family, with no great scandals or anyone noticeably drunk, but we're drunk anyway. We're drinking wine. The table is broken, split in two, but nobody seems to notice. In the middle of the table is a divide, a few splinters poking through the tablecloth, tearing it beside the seam, the splinters emerging like thorns. We are on one side, the relatives on the other...

[Above image is the cover of the Spring 2009 issue of The Southern Reivew.]

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During this summer transition of Luna Park from south (Hattiesburg, MS) to north (York, PA), posting will likely be less than constant. (We are "between" offices at the moment.) The following are highlights from literary magazines of past months that no doubt deserved much more attention than they received here.

The first issue of Ecotone: reimagining place under Ben George's editorship—the magazine's Evolution Issue commemorating the bicentennial of Darwin's birth—is robust (400+ pages), insightful (Sven Birkets on fatherhood, Philip Gerard on language, Stephen Jay Gould on Mickey Mouse), and arresting (with poems by Kwame Dawes and David Wagoner, fiction by Ben Fountain and Edith Pearlman). Plus this is the best designed issue yet by Alison Harney and her team: the typesetting and graphics are clean and appealing.

Harvard Review devoted a large portion of their last issue (35) to the literature of New Zealand, with writing by Vincent O'Sullivan, Paula Morris, and C. K. Stead, among others. Though much of that work was interesting, the piece I still recall from the issue many weeks after reading it is a stark story called "The Final Cold" by the American writer Charles Conley. The story, about a tribe living in the Arctic, begins and ends with the refrain "We know cold" and gets no warmer in the narrative in-between.

Last March, McSweeney's journalistic cousin The Believer released possibly their best film issue yet, with C. S. Leigh on the new physicality of cinema, avant-garde Polish movie posters (that make even comedies like Trading Places look like slasher films), and five short films of Jean-Luc Godard's American travels.

And, finally, an issue ago (issue 6.2), The Cincinnati Review published possibly the most at the same time brilliant, sensitive, and memorable piece of nonfiction I recall reading since the journalism of David Foster Wallace—Ted Sanders' elegiac essay "To Scale." What with Sanders' 139 footnotes and various graphics, the 45 page essay is hard to excerpt here in a way that will accurately represent the breadth and wonder he is able to convey in the piece, so I will end here with Sanders' own beginning (and still I will be leaving out 2 essential footnotes; my apologies):

The Myth of the Objective

I told my father this: If you fold a piece of paper in half fifty times, it will become so thick it will reach nearly the sun. My father didn't believe me—not at first. But logic is a powerful force, one my father reveres. Logic is the latticework upon which most of his imagination depends. Through the creative application of fact (he would admit), or by observing the relationships between facts that have been coaxed into proximity, it becomes possible to demonstrate things that could not otherwise be proven. Certain types of expansion, certain strains of contraction—these can elaborate nonsensically but defy refutation. In this manner, he and I quickly resolved the paper-folding issue that had come, however briefly, between us.

[Above image is Charles Burns' cover for The Believer's 2009 film issue]

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The following is another installment of our writers/editors interview series, with Marcelle Heath talking with Northville Review editor Erin Fitzgerald about pop culture, flash fiction, and inside jokes in April 2009. Fitzgerald likes to note that TNR was "named for Northville, CT—a town that Google thinks exists, but was never independently incorporated." An unintentionally imaginary city, then.

Marcelle Heath: In addition to operating The Northville Review and your blog, Rarely Likable, you are also a wonderful writer. I really enjoyed "Orange" and your "Dear Wigleaf" postcard in Wigleaf. Can you tell us a little about yourself, your work, and how TNR came about?

Erin Fitzgerald: Thanks so much! I grew up in Rochester, NY. That's also where I got my first typewriter, attended my first workshop, and broke my first stapler trying to make chapbooks. I've lived in western Connecticut with my husband and daughter for a long time now, but we visit Rochester a few times a year to see family and stock up on white hots, Wegmans pop, and Dinosaur BBQ sauce. In other words, we're expatriates...[continue reading]

[Above picture is the header image for Northville Review.]

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In case you missed it, May is being offered up by some (Emerging Writers Network's Dan Wickett and The Story Prize's Larry Dark) as National Short Story Month. Seems a good idea, and one reminiscent of the similar-minded Save the Short Story campaign begun in late 2007 by One Story. Though slow on the pick-up, Luna Park will focus on reviews and commentary on short stories from literary magazines for the rest of the month. Have any comments, reviews, observations to offer along these lines, send to: lunaparkreview@gmail.com.

Wickett and various other writers posting on Emerging Writers Network have already in a week seem to have done a lion's share of short story commentary, in the book and literary magazine realms. Here are a couple of notable pieces on a Brian Evenson story in Black Clock and a Gordon Lish piece from New York Tyrant.

[Short Story Month graphic above designed by Steven Seighman.]

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To win a signed copy of Mary Miller's short story collection, Big World, be the first to email lunaparkreview@gmail.com with your name, mailing address, and the correct answer to the following piece of lit mag trivia:

What U.S. literary magazine editor was fined $100 for publishing portions of James Joyce's Ulysses?

Answer: Margaret Anderson, founding editor of The Little Review

" I liked to say things to shock him, the truth. Like my father, he had sent me out into the big world all alone and I was going to show him how ugly it was."
—from the story "Big World"

 

Mary Miller's short story collection, Big World, was published by Short Flight/Long Drive Books in February 2009. Though previously known mainly for her pitch-perfect flash fiction, Miller's debut collection of full-length short stories is already receiving some wonderful praise. Kim Chinquee notes that, "Big World is a world of wonder. A powerful collection by an amazing writer." Johnathan Messinger adds in his review for Time Out Chicago that the stories construct a "sense of claustrophobia [that] never lets up." HTMLGIANT is unequivocal in praise, stating simply, "I am, without a doubt, profoundly envious of her work: I wish it were mine." Miller's stories have been published in Black Clock, Mississippi Review, Oxford American, and New Stories from the South 2008, among other places, and more stories are forthcoming in such magazines as McSweeney's Quarterly, Opium, and Versal. She is the author of the chapbook Less Shiny and is an associate editor at Quick Fiction.

*

LUNA PARK: First, congratulations on the publication of your first full-length collection of stories last month, Big World, published by Hobart’s book imprint, Short Flight / Long Drive Books—with some stunning David Kramer original cover art to boot. And then congrats again for your recent chapbook of stories, Less Shiny, from Magic Helicopter Press. But well before these books came out, I read and was delighted by your stories in literary magazines, first in an issue of Mississippi Review when I was on staff there, and later in Quick Fiction, Black Clock, Oxford American, and a dozen others. How did the Big World collection finally come about? Did Aaron [Burch, editor of Hobart] get in contact with you after you had a story in the magazine?

MARY MILLER: Aaron and Elizabeth actually accepted the manuscript before they published "Pearl" in Hobart 9. Elizabeth Ellen contacted me early last summer, asking if I had a short story manuscript they could look at. She'd read some of my flashes in Quick Fiction and Noo Journal and had liked them a lot (but didn't want to publish a collection of flash). At the time, I didn't really feel like I had a short story manuscript ready, but when I put it together, I had more stories than I thought, and I liked them better than I remembered. Things moved pretty quickly after that. We started looking at cover art almost immediately, and decided on the title Big World. It's kind of funny, but it took me a long time to realize how ironic the title is...[continue reading]

[The above picture is David Kramer's cover for Big World.]

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The storySouth Million Writers 2008 list of notable stories has gone up online. The storySouth Million Writers award recognizes "the best online short stories" published each year. The notable stories on the list are from AGNI, eyeshot, Blackbird, Hot Metal Bridge, Keyhole, Lamination Colony, and many other literary magazines—some, like failbetter and Anderbo, are online only magazines, and others like Subtropics and Granta, are print magazine with online content. Luna Park staff writer and editor for Quicksilver magazine Nicholas Ripatrazone was one of this years many judges. The top ten stories from this long list will be released on May 15th, after which there will be a public vote to decide the top online short story of 2008.

[The above picture is the official storySouth compass.]

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The current issue of elimae includes work by Norman Lock, Anya Yurchyshyn, Eric Beeny, Edward Mullany, and Sarah Mirza. Five Chapters posts "Sleeping with Pigs" by Jay McInerney. New stories by Suzanne Scanlon and Jason Rice, and multimedia by James Paterson are featured at failbetter. DIAGRAM announces its 2009 Hybrid Essay Contest Winner, Matthew Glenwood, and offers work by Jason Anthony, Sarah Bartlett, Kristen Eliason, Donna Hunt, Michael Jauchen, and many many more. Bound Off podcasts Angela Lovell's "There Must Be People Like That Here" and Zdravka Evtimova's "Not a Single Tree." And Lisa Zaran and Anjali Khosla Mullany have new work up at Juked.

[The above picture is table of contents image for DIAGRAM 9.1]

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The Academy of American Poets—the founding organization of National Poetry Month—offers a poem a day online and by email in order to promote the reading and appreciation of poetry, if only for the month of April. (To sign up for a daily poem, visit Poets.org.) Today's poem, "The National Interest" by Ted Mathys, seems, in a culture very interested in criminality and crowds, well worth noting here. Below are the first two stanzas:

We are interested in long criminal histories
because we've never bedded down in a cellblock.
With the sibilance of wind through the swaying
spires of skyscrapers as my witness. When I say
cover your grenades I mean it's going to rain I mean
there is mischief in every filibuster of sun.

We are interested in rigorously arranging
emotions by color as we've never been fully
divested of blues. With drinking till my fingernails
hurt as my witness, with hurt as my witness.
When I say be demanding I mean be fully
individual while dissolving in the crowd...[continue reading]

[The above picture is the official 2009 poster for National Poetry Month.]

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By Nicholas Ripatrazone

West Branch 63, the Fall/Winter 2008 issue of Bucknell’s semiannual, contains a rather conservative swath of poems, at least in the realm of structure and form. John Estes’s “Year: Two” is the lone exception, a four-page poem laddered in phrase and image. It is both welcoming and surprising, then, to see that James Harms’s essay in “The Back of the Book” deals with the malleable form of prose poetry. Harms, a contributing editor to the journal, offers a contemplative effort in “‘Goodtime’ Jesus and Other Sort-of Prose Poems,” a lean essay that turns the prose poem discussion in a noteworthy direction.

Harms’s critical pitch is relaxed and nearly folk: he hopes the reader can “make believe something is really at stake here.” He selects the approachable James Tate as his entry point into the form: the 1979 poem “Goodtime Jesus.” The choice is interesting: it is not a particularly palpable work. While the poem is representative of Tate’s canon and person—“funny and strange and maybe even a little dangerous”—it by no means commands linguistic attention. In fact, it is more akin to the first sounding within an apologia... [continue reading]

[The above picture is the cover art for West Branch 63: Unison, by Lance Morrison, 2008, oil on canvas. 72" x 48"]

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By Marcelle Heath

One of the few of its kind on the web, Born Magazine describes itself as "an experimental venue marrying literary arts and interactive media" where writers and media artists collaborate on projects. Setting aside, for now, its ideological nomenclature, its appeal lies in the interpretative dynamic between text and image.

The first project, "Inferno (Minor)," written by Gareth Lee, designed by Naz Hamid with Flash by Josh Kneedler, featured a white, naked woman. To read the text—about a man's thwarted attempts to "woo" a girl—you click on various parts of her body. (I must say I was an unwilling participant in this media venture.) In "House Fire," written by Allison Seay and designed by Felipe Hefler, a girl resembling a cheerful Lucy from Peanuts in both ensemble and pearls witnesses the aftermath of the fire she set to her house. She "remembered too late/the kerosene lamp, the girl who thinks the birds know the truth/it was you, it was you, they caw." And she is to be punished. Snakes appear, "their fangs charred open" and the text as ash disintegrates onscreen. "Dhaka Dust," written by Dilruba Ahmed and designed by Matt Pierce, utilizes the second person point of view and a grid of rickshaws to implicate us, as readers, as accessories to globalization:

Under your orna,
a laminated map and digital camera

cradled in your lap. One strand of silver
wiry by your ear. Bits of children’s songs

snag in your windpipe. Other words surface:
sweatshop and abject poverty, and you let them.

The last project, "Song of the Settled," written by Stephan Delbos, designed by Camille del Rosario with Flash by June Baldovino, takes a domestic view of economic crisis. The poem itself is oblique—there's a failing town on the sea, with mysterious characters planting ghost orchids and hiding in rusty sheds—but the images are stylized, whimsical replications of children's drawings. Both "Dhaka Dust" and "Song of the Settled" complicate my response to "Inferno (Minor) and "House Fire." I'm left with some unanswered questions, which, overall, is a good thing where poetry is concerned.

[The above picture is Daniel Mrgan's cover art for Born Magazine Issue One, 2009]

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The recent fervor for change has certainly caught hold in the literary magazine world, at least in the bigger of the little magazines of literary publishing. In celebration of its 30th anniversary, London's Granta magazine has done yet another website revamping, this time adding user-interface features and more online-only material. In the states, both BOMB magazine and Harvard Review have done some print issue reworkings, both in size as well as design, each adding, among other things, lovely new covers to their publications. Of these two, BOMB has done the most serious redesign—and it is a work in progress: they want your feedback.

[The above picture is the cover of Harvard Review 35.]

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Luna Park asked the editors of Knockout why they decided to start a new literary magazine. Here's what they said.

From Brett Ortler, co-editor/founder of Knockout

I started Knockout along with my co-founder Jeremy Halinen. We started KO because we wanted to try something that was different than we'd seen in other literary magazines, both in terms of thematic slant and in terms of a "mission," if you could call it that. That is, we wanted to run a magazine that was as open to as many varying styles as possible, but we also wanted to dedicate the magazine to social action. For this reason, we try to balance each issue with a fairly equal mix of straight/GLBT writers, as this is a combination one doesn't see elsewhere. In addition, we didn't want just to do art for art's sake; we wanted to help others along the way, if we could. That's why we do our best to give to charitable causes with each issue. In this way, we're trying to achieve three social goods: helping popularize poetry by printing fine work, featuring GLBT and straight writers side by side, and helping others through charitable causes.

So far, it's been fun, if difficult. But it's certainly been worth the effort.

[The above picture is the cover of Knockout.vol. 2 no. 1.]

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By Greg Weiss

The following is an interview with Don Bogen, poetry editor of The Cincinnati Review, conducted by Greg Weiss. It is the first of our ongoing series of writers interviewing literary magazine editors.

*

Greg Weiss: What type of poetry would you say that The Cincinnati Review publishes?

Don Bogen: CR is quite eclectic in its approach and accepts poems of all sorts, so there's no real "type" of poem I could define. This eclectic approach is less a matter of editorial philosophy than of taste, I suspect. All kinds of poems interest us in different ways. When I'm reading for the magazine, I like to consider what a poem is asking of me in its own terms and judge it on the basis of both that aim, if you will, and how well it achieves that aim. Clearly we're interested in a certain boldness in new work, a certain energy. But that energy can come across in many ways: a fresh subject, but also a fresh look at a traditional subject, or a fresh take on conventions of style or voice. On one level or another, all the poems we accept have surprised me—sometimes flamboyantly, sometimes more subtly; they did something I didn't expect, and did it with craft and imagination. I would expect that a given reader would not like all the poems in an issue (or at least not like them as much as we do); in fact, he or she might actively dislike some of them (not too many, I hope). This would be a natural result of the focus on the individual poem and its particular claims...[continue reading]

[The above picture is the cover of The Cincinnati Review issue 4.1, cover design by Barbara Neely Bourgoyne.]

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Upcoming: an interview with story writer Mary Miller regarding her new book Big World (stories of which have appeared in Mississippi Review, Black Clock, Oxford American, Quick Fiction, and elsewhere); a Luna Park interview series with literary magazine editors, beginning this week with an interview with Don Bogen, poetry editor at Cincinnati Review; plus an inside look at Knockout magazine and Nicholas Ripatrazone on the latest West Branch. Plus random literary magazine updates on the LP Blog.

[Picture is artist David Kramer's cover for Big World.]

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By Marcelle Heath

Literary Bohemian's current issue is BYOB, a literary party where "RSVP[s] will be analyzed for errata." I imagine party-goers huddled around a fire pit as they share stories about stalking a would-be lover in Laurie Byro's "Tetraimeros", about following the circus in "Learning to Travel" by Julene Tripp Weaver, and about the intimacy of shorn hair in R. Nemo Hill's "Foreigner’s Haircut." The peculiar wonder of travel is evident, including its opposite in the refusal to depart of RL Swihart's "The Fortress":

They were happy in Lübeck. They crossed out every fifth day and repeated the others twice. Instead of an onion he’d peel an orange and she’d sit and listen. Instead of a fish she’d hold up an eel or boletus and they’d end by making love.

She’d gather and wash the stones then he’d etch the Tor or lions into the stones’ flat faces and place them in the window for sale. The stones piled up, eyes shined and hands fumbled, but the door never opened.

Orange, eel, boletus. Stones piling up. Within a year—by whose measure—even sunlight failed to find an entrance. Mortar was the last step before they disappeared... [continue reading]

[Above picture is Literary Bohemian logo]]

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By Nicholas Ripatrazone

Contemporary flash fiction has been slugged, whipped, and slapped: dragged through the literary mud, pegged as incidental. While some appreciate the concision of the form, others hate the practice, positing that flash fiction has excised indelible elements of fiction, including pacing, profluence, and emotional resonance. Many of these criticisms are warranted. Often works of flash fiction appear as appendages of longer narratives: well-crafted scenes, but not autonomous stories.

Brevity, the online journal of “extremely brief” creative nonfiction, was first published in 1997. The journal accepts and publishes works of less than 750 words; a heartbeat on the page. Brevity proves that the stunted narrative is better suited for literary fact, not fiction. While many criticisms of flash fiction originate in the form’s anaerobic nature, creative nonfiction is a vastly different medium... [continue reading]

[Above picture is the Brevity logo.]

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By Marcelle Heath

First, Narrative presents Thriller Fiction, 5 Must Read Classics, 4 Great Tales of Africa, plus Kate Atkinson, Jayne Anne Phillips, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Anne Beattie, and N3OB Winners, Kara Levy, Alita Putnam, and Alison Yin and more.

BREVITY 29 offers a Warm Winter Stew with work by Lance Larsen, David Bradley, Tim Elhajj, John Bresland, Diane Seuss, Joe Bonomo, Kyle Minor, Laura Sewell Matter, Elizabeth Westmark, and Bryan Fry. New Craft Essays from Brenda Miller and Lisa Knopp.

And over at Triple Canopy, John Powers investigates the link between Star Wars & Modernism, Joseph Clark takes a look at the Kentucky's Creationism Museum, Marc Vives visits the Holy Land Experience theme park, and Tim Davis and Hannah Whitaker's poems and photocollages bring together all things in Magic.

[Above picture is by Tim Davis from "Original Ideas in Magic" by Tim Davis with Hannah Whitaker from Triple Canopy 4]

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By Marcelle Heath

Anderbo, one of Esquire blog's five best literary magazine websites, has published its first novella, "We Were There and Now We're Here" by Kayla Soyer-Stein. It begins with an epigraph from Gunter Kunert's postmodern "Sleeping Beauty." In Grimm's classic tale, the whole castle falls asleep along with the princess after she pricks her finger on a spindle and is cursed for a hundred years sleep; the servants, the farm animals, as well as the Queen and King. A hedge grows up around the castle, preventing anyone from entering it. When a hundred years pass, a prince arrives and the briar-rose parts, revealing the castle and its sleeping inhabitants in medias res. He kisses the princess and the curse is broken... [continue reading]

[Above picture is a German postal stamp, Deutsche Bundespost, of Sleeping Beauty meeting the old woman spinning.]

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Flatmancrooked is already selling John Updike T-shirts, in order to, they say, celebrate the life rather than mourn the passing of one of the twentieth centuries most distinguished American authors. In a very different spirit of celebration, The Nation is publishing a two-part series of editor/author Ted Solotaroff's unfinished memoir "Adventures in Editing" [link is to part one of the memoir]. Noo Journal editor Mike Young posts an insightful essay on HTMLGIANT about lit mag publications, submissions, online databases and the worth value of it all. In an ongoing series examining "the ecology of books," Canada's National Post takes a look at Canadian literary journals, beginning with Descant and Brick. In the spirit of new beginnings, McSweeney's and 826 Valencia published Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country (pictured at left), a collection of children's letters from across the country to President Obama. Media Bistro says "Buy a Drink, Support a Literary Magazine," which seems like a win-win affair.

[Above picture is the cover of McSweeney's recent book, Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country.]

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By Marcelle Heath

Charles P. Ries's two poems "Killing Season" and "Sex for Liver" are featured in the recent issue of Shape of a Box, a YouTube literary magazine from Folded Word Press. The following is an interview with Ries and Jessie Carty, editor of Folded Word Press and Shape of a Box, about mink farmers, Greek sex bandits, and Googling anti-depressants.

Luna Park : Charles, In the "Killing Season," the speaker's status of conscientious objector to the Vietnam War comes under scrutiny because of his profession as a mink farmer and is accused of being a "Natural Born Killer." The speaker of "Sex for Liver" mourns the loss of intimacy after his lover goes on anti-depressants (wonderfully named "sex bandits") who turn their world "Ipso-Flipso." I thought Daniel Shapiro's reading captured the droll tone in your work. There's an underlying sweetness and nostalgia to the narrator's stories, which the images of lovable minks hunting (in "Killing Season") and cartoon drawings (in "Sex for Liver") supports. How would you describe your poetry? Can you discuss the collaboration with Jessie for Shape of a Box? What is it like to hear other people read your work?

Charles Ries: My poetry is generally a collision of secular experience meeting the sublime. Taking something very common and finding one of its hidden meanings. Recently I won a best humorous poem competition, and it appears I have a knack for healthy self-ridicule... [continue reading]

[Above picture is a photo of Charles Ries.]

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John Updike, who passed away at 76 this past Tuesday, is remembered at The New Yorker by E. L. Doctorow, Jonathan Lethem, and others. The New Yorker was the big literary magazine where Updike spent most of his time, writing more than 800 pieces for the magazine during his life. Looking back: In an article from a 1984 issue of The London Review of Books, James Atlas described Updike the critic as "gracious, even-tempered, gay, an urbane and witty host introducing his favourite books to the readers he’s invited over." Here's a nice post about Updike at the Ploughshares blog. And here's a mention about Updike from The Lampoon, the campus magazine Updike drew and wrote for while a student at Harvard; the magazine also includes links to two comics Updike drew for the magazine.

[Above picture is a comic John Updike drew for The Lampoon while a Harvard student.]

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Our links page (see above menu bar) is finally hyperlinked. Find directions to a massive list of literary magazines and sites that cover literary magazines and matters related.

If you have suggestions for additions to the list (such as literary magazine we missed), please let us know: lunaparkreview@gmail.com

[Above picture is the cover of the recent issue of ZYZZYVA, the last on our list.]

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Our first literary magazine dabbling President is now officially in the White House. In December, David Barber wrote in the Atlantic Monthly about Obama's poetic predecessor. And, The New York Times has a transcript of Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem.

[Above picture is of the 2009 inauguration of President Obama from whitehouse.gov.]

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By Travis Kurowski

The following is an excerpt of our interview with Andrew Porter, author most recently of the story collection, The Theory of Light and Matter.

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Luna Park: All of the stories in your Flannery O’Connor Award winning first story collection, The Theory of Light and Matter, are finely-constructed dramatic musings on American life. Marilynne Robinson seems to accurately describe the pieces as “highly controlled,” as fiction with “transparency as its adornment.” This is high praise for a first collection, and well-deserved praise, as it is difficult to imagine the stories being any more clearly told—and so equally difficult to imagine them any more heartbreaking in the end. The worlds of the characters in these stories are depicted with such clarity, as are their fates. Though some pieces end hopefully, much of the collection is tinged with melancholy, and the characters are so typically burdened by emotional stress they seem barely able to discern in the fog of the present. Do you think melancholic would be an accurate description of the collection as a whole? Or is that inaccurate? What word or words might you use to describe the collection?

Andrew Porter: Thanks for the kind words. As for your question, I think that all of these stories are about some form of longing, and when you write about longing there’s bound to be a lingering sense of absence that pervades the work and maybe that’s what you’re picking up on. That said, I also try to infuse enough light into these stories, enough hope, that even when the characters are left in a tough spot at the end—as they often are—there’s still the possibility for change. They still have what Marilynne Robinson used to refer to as “the open destiny of life.” I think about that a lot—about the balance of light and dark and about allowing my characters to have an open destiny. I think that’s one of the most important aspects of story writing.

LP: What initially brought you to writing? And, specifically, what draws you to the short form? For example, I feel my youthful obsession with comic books has a lot to do with my attraction to literary magazines. What early influences did you have? From your fiction and interviews you’ve given, I would guess suburban life and the stories of John Cheever.

AP: I always knew that I wanted to do something artistic, and much of my childhood and teenage years were devoted to visual arts (especially drawing), writing music, and eventually filmmaking, which was what I initially planned to pursue in college. I didn’t really become interested in writing until the summer after my freshman year when I stumbled upon a book of Raymond Carver’s short stories on my parents’ bookshelf. I remember reading that book with amazement, and then rereading it and rereading it... [continue reading]

[Above picture is of the author from his website.]

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In case you missed it last October, here's a post on Poetry Foundation about Stephen McLaughlin, Gregory Laynor & Vladimir and Aleksandrovich Zykov's Issue 1, the poetry compendium composed by computer. (And here is an interesting commentary on the project by Dylan Kinnett from his blog.) At England's Literary Review, famed feminist literary theorist Elaine Showalter writes on Susan Sontag's recently published journals. New issue of Vice includes Andrew W. K. reading an Ann Beattie story and an unofficial syllabus from Jim Shepard. And, on the gossip side of things, BOMB magazine associate publisher Mary-Ann Monforton's Bed-Stu brownstone was bankrolled by a Basquiat painting.

[Above picture is the cover of Issue 1.]

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Months ago, a copy of Jesse Ball's Parables & Lies—the inagural issue of The Cupboard, a new "quarterly pamphlet of literary prose" out of Lincoln, Nebraska—arrived at Luna Park. The Cupboard has already moved on to their next issue, Louis Streitmatter's A New Map of America, but the first issue still deserves a mention.

Parables & Lies is a series of prose poems (or short shorts or flash fictions, whichever is the going phrase in 2009). The pieces are small bits of the imaginary—so fitting well with the micro-small format of The Cupboard—written in the tradition of Kafka (who is quoted as an epigraph to the work) and Borges, and also similar to the work of contemporary writers Shepard and Millhauser. Together the pieces seem to promote the idea that such fantasies as these authors conceived exist all around us, are the very fabric of our world and our history; it is an argument of an aesthetic perspective. Though Parables &