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A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry and essays along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letters. Literary magazines are often called literary journals, or little magazines, which is not meant as a pejorative but instead as a contrast with larger commercially oriented magazines.^[1]

History of literary magazines

Literary magazines first began to appear in the early part of the 19th century, mirroring an overall rise in the number of books, magazines and scholarly journals being published at that time. In Great Britain, critics Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham and Sydney Smith founded the Edingburgh Review in 1802. Other British reviews of this period included the Westminster Review (1824), the Spectator (1828) and Athenaeum (1828). In the United States, early journals included the Philadelphia Literary Magazine (1803–08), the Monthly Anthology (1803–11), which became the North American Review, the Yale Review (founded in 1819), Dial (1840–44) and the New Orleans-based De Bow’s Review (1846–80). Several prominent literary magazines were published in Charleston, South Carolina, including the Southern Review from 1828–32 and Russell's Magazine from 1857–60).^[2]

The North American Review is the oldest American literary magazine, but publication was suspended during World War II whereas the Yale Review was not, making the Yale journal the oldest literary magazine in continuous publication. By the end of the century, literary magazines had become an important feature of intellectual life in many parts of the world.

Among the literary magazines that began in the early part of the 20th century is Poetry Magazine, founded in 1912, which published T. S. Eliot's first poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Other important early-20th century literary magazines include The Times Literary Supplement (1902), Southwest Review (1915), Virginia Quarterly Review (1925), Southern Review (1935) and New Letters (1935). The Sewanee Review, although founded in 1892, achieved prominence largely thanks to Allen Tate, who became editor in 1944.^[3]

Two of the most influential — and radically different — journals of the last-half of the 20th century were The Kenyon Review (KR) and the Partisan Review. The Kenyon Review, founded by John Crowe Ransom, espoused the so-called New Criticism. Its platform was avowedly unpolitical. Although Ransom came from the South and published authors from that region, KR also published many New York-based and international authors. The Partisan Review was first associated with the American Communist Party and the John Reed Club, however, it soon broke ranks with the party. Nevertheless, politics remained central to its character, while it also published significant literature and criticism.

The middle-20th century saw a boom in the number of literary magazines, which corresponded with the rise of the small press. Among the important journals which began in this period were Nimbus: A Magazine of Literature, the Arts, and New Ideas, which began publication in 1951 in England, the Paris Review, which was founded in 1953, Poetry Northwest, which was founded in 1959, the legendary^[4] X Magazine, which ran from 1959-62, and the Denver Quarterly, which began in 1965. The 1970s saw another surge in the number of literary magazines, with a number of distinguished journals getting their start during this decade, including Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Granta, Agni, The Missouri Review, and New England Review. Other highly regarded print magazines of recent years include The Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ascent, Shenandoah, The Greensboro Review, ZYZZYVA, Glimmer Train, Tin House, the Canadian magazine Brick, the Australian magazine Skive, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Some short fiction writers, such as Steve Almond, Jacob Appel, Stephen Dixon and Mary Yukari Waters, have built national reputations in the United States primarily through publication in literary magazines.

The Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers (COSMEP) was founded by Hugh Fox in the mid-1970s. It was an attempt to organize the energy of the small presses. Len Fulton, editor and founder of Dustbook Publishing, assembled and published the first real list of these small magazines and their editors in the mid-1970s. This made it possible for poets to pick and choose the publications most amenable to their work and the vitality of these independent publishers was recognized by the larger community, including the National Endowment for the Arts, which created a committee to distribute support money for this burgeoning group of publishers called the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM). This organisation evolved into the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP).

Many prestigious awards exist for works published in literary magazines including the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Awards. Literary magazines also provide many of the pieces in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Essays annual volumes.

Online literary magazines

Around 1996, online literary magazines began to appear. At first, some writers and readers dismissed online literary magazines as not equal in quality or prestige to their print counterparts, while others said that these were not properly magazines and were instead ezines. Since then, though, many writers and readers have accepted online literary magazines as another step in the evolution of the independent literary journals. Among the better known online literary magazines are 3:AM Magazine, 20x20 magazine, The Barcelona Review, Eclectica Magazine, Failbetter, Identity Theory (webzine), Literary Mama, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Monkeybicycle, Spike Magazine, StorySouth and Word Riot, but there are literally thousands of online literary publications and it is difficult to judge the quality and overall impact of this relatively new publishing medium.^[5]

See also

• Short story
• List of literary magazines

References

• Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, "The Oxford critical and cultural history of modernist magazines, Volume One: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955" (Oxford University Press. ISBN 978 0 19 921115 9) [2]

External links

• Council of Literary Magazines and Small Presses
• Duotrope's Digest, a database of over 2125 current markets for short fiction, poetry, and novels/collections
• The Little Magazine a Hundred Years On A Reader's Report by Steve Evans
• Little Magazine Interview Index Housed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Special Collections, the Little Magazine Collection, one of the most extensive of its kind in the United States, includes approximately 7,000 English-language literary magazines published in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia/New Zealand, mostly in the 20th century.