CONTENTS


UPCOMING: Nicholas Ripatrazone on Robert Olen Butler and the short story; Greg Weiss on recent Witness "Dismissing Africa" issue; The threat to university literary magazines; An in-depth look at Asia Literary Review; more of our Writers/Editors interview series...

Interview: Erin Fitzgerald, Northville Review
By Marcelle Heath

"I like when someone's very quietly or very openly fooling with an emotional manipulation dial."
"While my stories aren't autobiographical, I really do believe in the whole write-what-you-know thing. One time I wrote a story from the point of view of an old sick man and it was just terrible. It was like really bad Carver. The man sat around watching daytime television and eating pie."

Sort-of Prose Poems
By Nicholas Ripatrazone

"James Harms offers a contemplative effort in a lean essay that turns the prose poem discussion in a noteworthy direction..."

Poetry 2.0
By Marcelle Heath

"Setting aside, for now, its ideological nomenclature, its appeal lies in the interpretative dynamic between text and image..."

Greetings from Knockout
By Brett Ortler

"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 mission..."
"He said that if he were asked to be poetry editor of a magazine, he would aim for unity. I told him that was more or less the exact opposite of what I wanted to do..."

Bon Voyage
By Marcelle Heath

"I imagine party-goers huddled around a fire pit as they share stories about stalking a would-be lover..."

In Brief: The Appeal of Brevity
By Nicholas Ripatrazone

"Contemporary flash fiction has been slugged, whipped, and slapped: dragged through the literary mud, pegged as incidental..."
"Kayla Soyer-Stein recreates the wonderful magic and sense of the uncanny that fairy tales offer..."
"Recently I won a best humorous poem competition, and it appears I have a knack for healthy self-ridicule..."
"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..."
"It calls itself the 'farthest north literary journal for writing and the arts,' which sounded a bit suspicious to me, so I did a little poking around to verify the assertion..."

Some Thoughts on Poetry
By Ben Leubner

"The history of Poetry is a history of resistance in all directions..."
"The 1990s was a wild, wonderful, idealistic decade in Prague. Excellent exchange rates and the possibility of a relatively uninhibited way of life lured expatriates in droves to the Czech capital. In short, it was the perfect time for the founding of a literary journal..."
"One author climbs to the top of a tree trunk support beam that’s part of the architecture of the writing space. Another is balancing a couch cushion on his head and explaining wog: a dog who uses a dog-sized wheel chair to get his back end around San Francisco..."

Avian Arts: The LBJ
By Nicholas Ripatrazone

"While literary niches often result in suffocation, eighty pages of plaid, The LBJ’s aviary focus proves malleable enough..."

The 7th Annual New Orleans Bookfair
By Kenneth Harshbarger

“'In consideration of what looks like a total collapse of our economic system,' he said, 'I thought the bookfair went very well...'"
"There are two wooden figures on my husband’s desk. Figurines. They are meant to resemble humans, black humans. African-Americans..."
 
 

Introduction: Hobart and the Future of Lit (Mags)

"I was at this airport bar. I wondered what motivated people. I missed my connecting flight. Things happened."
—the first lines of "Layover" by Kim Chinquee;
Hobart #5

"Our father laughed and we felt exhaustion in how he propped his body against our own. We heard thirst in the bobbing of his throat. We saw age in the whiskers around his ears and nose, and age startled us, hung us out to dry."
—from "Age Hung Us Out to Dry," by Ryan Call;
Hobart #8

"You know that feeling you get when like somebody's trying to make a point and they say something like, 'it's like the difference between driving a Kia, and a Lexus...' and you're like driving a Kia. Or when like somebody tells you about the worst fucking movie that they ever saw, and you kind of really loved it. Or like everybody..."
—from an untitled painting by David Kramer;
Hobart #7

 

Soon after I began Luna Park, a thick package arrived in the mail one morning (August 16, 2007) from Ann Arbor, Michigan. The package didn’t stand out in any way and I tossed it on the desk next to the others from that week. I had been receiving review copies of literary magazines for some time at that point, and the various publications were scattered throughout the house: next to the lamp alongside the bed, on the butcher block in the kitchen, in mini-stacks on the dining room table, tucked in between back issues of The Nation and Dwell on the living room ottoman. When I got around to opening that package from Michigan that evening, I was given my first introduction to Aaron Burch’s Hobart.

Hobart, a small literary magazine published almost exclusively by Burch out of Ann Arbor, was a special magazine for me—not because it is "better" than any other literary magazine, because I wouldn't say that it is. Hobart was simply a literary magazine that right away spoke to my own literary interests. (I have found others before and since that do so as well, but what particularly drew me to Hobart was that the work Burch published reminded me so much of what I imagined myself writing, which was almost eerie to encounter; sort of the magazine as a Lacanian mirror.)

What Hobart was (and is) for me was an imagined community such as Benedict Anderson writes about—which is, I think, a great part of what literary magazines are good at creating. Magazines like The Masses, The Little Review, the first and second Dial, Harriet Monroe's Poetry, Kulchur, Neon, kayak, and many others were enjoyed so much by readers because they made it possible for these readers to imagine a world of similar readers outside of their own community. McSweeney's does this. So does The Minnesota Review. So does every magazine discussed in this issue of Luna Park. Every publication does this in one way or another. The only thing special about literary magazines is that they bring together readers by using literature.

Hobart publishes great writing—such as, in the most recent issue, fantastic stories by Benjamin Percy, Sheila Heti, Lee Henderson, Chris Bachelder, Ryan Call, and others—but many magazines do that. The writing in Hobart just seems to be for a reader like myself, and I think that is saying something. I think this is something literary magazines do very well, maybe even better than other such venues. Magazines such as Partisan Review and Story are thought of in such awe because of the great writing they published and because of the communities of readers they created because of that.

-Travis Kurowski
May 15, 2008

 

FEATURED MAGAZINE / JULY 2009:
CONJUNCTIONS

Conjunction issue 52 cover image

Conjunctions 52: Betwixt the Between, Impossible Realism
Editor: Bradford Morrows and Brian Evenson. Bard College, NY. Est. 1981. www.conjunctions.com


NOTICE: Luna Park will be moving to York College of Pennsylvania this coming August. Please update your contact information:

Luna Park
441 Country Club Road
York, PA 17403-3651


NEWSREEL

New literary magazine from Dzanc Books, The Collagist, edited by Matt Bell (in case you forgot, we are fans of Mr. Bell)

Granta teams up with Flavorpill for The Rehearsal Project Short-Film Contest

Isotopeliterary/science hybrid magazinelooks like it will be losing its funding from Utah State University

Waldo Jaquith of Virginia Quarterly Review busts Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson for wiki-plagiarism

Canadian magazines such as Malahat Review threatened by national funding changes

John Freeman steps in as new editor of Granta—previous editor Alex Clark stepped down after just 18 months in the job

Ted Genoways & Michael Lukas blog at VQR on threats to New England Review and The Southern Review

New literary magazine out of Oxford, Mississippi: Kitty Snacks

Utne Reader announces 2009 Independent Press Awards, winners include VQR, Lapham's, and etc.

New literary magazine wordriver dedicated to creative writing of all non-tenure instructors at universities

io9 blogs about "New Wave Fabulists" issue of Conjunctions

PAST NEWSREEL...


EVENTS

July 15: Park Lit in Fort Greene Park. An evening of readings and music with A Public Space contributors, editors, and friends. Park Lit, a summer reading series in New York City's parks, is sponsored by The New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, Open City, and Mr. Beller's Neighborhood. Fort Greene Park Visitor Center Brooklyn, NY 7:00 PM

Opium magazine Literary Death Match: NYC, San Fran, Denver, Beijing, etc [ongoing series]

One Story cocktail hour at Pianos, New York City [ongoing series]


Luna Park is a proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses



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