Mississippi Review online has just put up its latest issue: "The Literary Magazine at 100." The issue title is in reference to the 100th birthday of the contemporary literary magazine (meaning the literary magazine as we recognize the form today), placing its contemporary beginning at Ford Madox Ford's The English Review launch in 1908. (For further information on this, see Steve Evans's essay "The Little Magazine a Hundred Years On.") More than just a celebration of the form, the issue functions as an investigation into and commentary on the literary magazine of past and present.

The online issue of MR functions as a teaser for the upcoming fall 2008 print issue of the magazine, which will contain everything from the online issue, along with a variety of other pieces--such as new fiction from John Brandon and Rene Houtrides, an interview with the editor of Antioch Review, a roundtable discussion between editors of some of the nation's best literary magazines, an oral history of the literary magazine (in the tradition of Plimpton), and, of course, much more.

[This special issue of MR is guest edited by Travis Kurowski, editor of Luna Park, and Gary Percesepe.]

Is Not a Magazine will soon no longer be a magazine, offices to close June 30 (after hyperlink jump, see right sidebar for details). Editor of the excellent literary magazine december, Curt Johnson, has died. On a more positive note: New Pages blogs about the West Coast's new The Farallon Review, and The Millions writes on new Madison, Wisconsin lit mag Avery (issue 3 pictured at right). Alan Gilbert in Poetry's Harriet blog on recent A Public Space reading by Peter Gizzi, Matthea Harvey, and Cathy Park Hong. And, yes, the rumors are true: Hamish Hamilton is launching a free monthly literary magazine: Five Dials. Luna Park contributor Nigel Beale writes at The Quarterly Conversation on Roberto Bolano's encyclopedic novel, Nazi Literature in the Americas. Pinky's Paperhaus's Carolyn Kellog's recent posts at the LA Times' book blog on New Pages lit mag site extraordinaire and Hayden's Ferry Review grotesque alongside Mary Gaitskill. Mosaic magazine editor Ron Kavanaugh in an interview over at Blog Critics. Lit mag siting of note: Javier Marias miscellany in the summer issue of The Threepenny Review. Graphic designer (and novelist) David Barringer offers up some sneaks peeks of Opium 6: Go Green, but Save Me First! INTHEFRAY magazine is looking for a new executive director.

[Above image is the cover of Avery 3, the new literary magazine mentioned above out of Madison, WI.]

BY MARCELLE HEATH

As a follow-up to our Summer of Politics (see below post) is the poet Gerald Stern’s essay “Bullet in My Neck” from the Fall 2003 issue of The Georgia Review. Stern writes about being shot in the late 1980s when he and his companion became lost in Newark, NJ and two boys approached their vehicle at a red light.

The one thing the doctors, the nurses, and the police lieutenant, who came later, said over and over was that it was a mistake to stop at the red light. ‘Why did you stop at the red light?’ I was asked. ‘No one stops at that light!’ I felt guilty, as if I myself were the perpetrator.

For Stern, he felt grief but almost no anger at the boys who shot him, and makes the analogy between Newark, which at this time was poverty-stricken and crime-ridden, and his hometown of Pittsburgh in the 1930s. He writes that “Growing up in a brutal time, in a brutal city, I was always alert to vicious, unexpected, and insane behavior. I learned early not to be astonished at the undeserved and outrageous.”

In his hospital room, Stern reflects on the shooting of the writer and artist Bruno Schulz in 1942 by a German officer and the killing of a bullfrog by a childhood friend.

A bullfrog is not a Jewish slave, let alone a gifted and famous one, but the state of mind—of heart—may have been the same in the two murderers. I thought about the frog for years… As for the murder of Schulz, that beautiful writer—and painter—it has become for me, as I know it has for others, a symbol of capricious and perverse human behavior.

If the history of violence is rooted in economic, political, religious, and social oppression, then the history of literature is to make sense of this. “I have taken up the trade of poet in part because of the difficulty in understanding—and the need to ‘explain’—just that willful, capricious, perverse behavior.” This is the project of the writer. As we see every day, writers all over the world are censored, suppressed, imprisoned, and murdered for seeking to make sense. Or to not make sense. By incorporating allusions from history and literature—from Schulz to Emma Goldman to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus—Stern does both, brilliantly. Stern’s empathy for the boys who shot him, his humaneness in the face of violence, and his faith in his life’s-work is what makes “Bullet in My Neck,” which was later anthologized in The Best American Essays 2004, a beautiful and stirring portrait.

Marcelle Heath is a writer and editor. Her fiction has appeared online at Mississippi Review, Pindeldyboz, and in Portland Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon and is completing a novel, Off Island. She is also copy editor for Luna Park.

[For more on the "writers all over the world...censored, suppressed, imprisoned, and murdered" that Heath mentions—as well as information on what you can do to help—visit the PEN America website. Also check out their wonderful international literary magazine: PEN America Journal. -Ed.]

In almost a response (at least in our minds) to Luna Park's recent piece on literary magazines and politics, Morris Dickstein writes in the current issue of Bookforum on "Fiction and Political Fact" (followed by commentary on political literature from international authors). Two reviews of recent biographies on two writers influential in the achievements of early 20th century American literary magazines: Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky. Two Asian literary magazines—Eslite Reader (Taiwan) and Translation (Shanghai)—say goodbye. The Believer cover artist Charles Burns has a new book out! Charlotte Roche—German feminist author of controversial (and best selling) sensual novel Wetlands—interviewed recently in Granta. Latest issue of The Paris Review unveils electric Satchmo collages. Virginia Quarterly Review and ZYZZYVA editor Howard Junker debate the proper funtion of the lit mag. Listen to editor Caroline Mercurio of Hunger Mountain talk about the current state of lit mags on Write the Book. The O'Henry Prize Stories 2008 is available, with work from Yiyun Li, Alice Munro, William Gass, Sheila Kohler, and more--you can read Laura Furman's introduction of the anthology here. The second installment of the Online Nabokov Journal is up, with a timely interview with Vladimir Nabokov's son about the master's incomplete and soon to be published novel, Laura. And—strangely, perhaps—indie publishing phenom and Luna Park supporter Tao Lin wages sticker war on Gawker. From the archive: James Schuyler's 1973 poem from Poetry magazine "Hymn to Life" is available in-full online from Poetry—this stunning mid-career work by Schuyler seems to capture all of life in one frantic breath.

[Above image is from a triptych by Fernando Botero of the Abu Ghraib atrocities; the image is reprinted in the above-mentioned fiction and politics issue of Bookforum. Botero's Abu Ghraib paintings were also the focus of a recent issue of Virginia Quarterly Review.]

"The sky was laced with Irish cream mist, that mellow tan overhanging the hills, which were studded with deathmasks and baskets spilling flowers from both ends..." So begins Ange Mlinko's fractured poem of matrimony, lightning, and horror films, "A Not Unruffled Surface," from the June 2008 issue of Poetry. The issue is an all poetry issue, filled with work by—among others—Charles Bernstein, A. R. Ammons, Donald Revell, Charles Simic, Michael Hoffman, and Meghan O'Rourke. Overall, the pieces inside are ones of quiet expression, most often choosing resignation over revolt. Nonetheless, like nearly every issue of Poetry, every poem is filled with language to break your teeth on.

Aside from Mlinko's poems (here's another taste of the controlled frenzy of her writing: “'In a flash,'” as they say, we could acquire a self-renewing subscription to classical music (it’s always classical in the scientific literature) accessible at all hours and piped into the forebrain from the hypothalamus"), Rae Armantrout's poems are the strongest in the issue. Her four poems are filled with Armantrout's usual anxiety tinted imagination, and which makes for the type of poetry reading experience Emily Dickinson was looking for. In her presentation at least, Armantrout is very similar to Akhmatova and Grace Paley, poets who seem in their poetry to have nothing to prove, but only fantastic (and often disturbing) observations to share. Here's an excerpt from her poem "Apartment":

2

The present
is a sentimental favorite,
with its heady mix
of grandiosity
and abjection,
truncated,
framed.

3

It's as if I'm subletting
a friend's apartment.
Even in the dream,
I'm trying to imagine
which friend.

And I'm trying to get
all my robes together,
robes I really own and
robes I don't

[Above image is the cover of the June 2008 issue of Poetry, the longest running United States poetry magazine.]