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On Literary Magazines Part 1: Virginia Quarterly Review
March 13, 2007
This year's PW poetry feature is on literary magazines and their relationship to book publishing. Over the next few days, I want to mention a few other literary magazines I love that didn't make it into the piece, either because they do not feature poetry, or simply because I didn't have space to cover everything I wanted to.
These magazines are rarely big sellers (though the folks at Poetry told me their circulation is about 30,000, which seems like a lot to me, especially for a publication exclusively about the art of verse-making), but they really are the blood cells flowing through the veins of literary life (is that gross?).
So, today it's Virginia Quarterly Review, published by the University of Virginia in January, April, July and October:
Within this roughly 300 page book-bound journal, you'll find some of the best and most ambitious nonfiction around. While the New Yorker has become a great place to get a certain kind of news, all New Yorker stories tend to sound a bit like other New Yorker stories. VQR offers similar satisfactions, often in longer, more in-depth pieces. In VQR, there are extended stories on everything from war, politics, personal histories, and art, all exquisitely edited and illustrated. Folks like Tom Bissell and Lawrence Weschler are frequent contributors. The cover feature in the newest issue (Winter 2007) is a series of pieces about Oil in Africa. There's also a piece by Art Spiegelman, a symposium on lyric poetry, which I believe stems from or is a source for the new Graywolf book Radiant Lyre and poems by, among others, the increasingly exciting Paisley Rekdal (the long title poem of her new book, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, is awesome) and C. Dale Young, who's also about to release a great new collection called The Second Person (to be reviewed in an upcoming issue of PW). VQR is one of the best small magazines.
Posted by Craig Morgan Teicher on March 13, 2007 | Comments (0)
