Leave “mag” off the URL for the Believer (www.believermag.com) and you arrive at the Web site for a Bible study center that “bases all teaching on Scripture.” Add a patriotic “usa” and you get the home page of the Ozzy Osbourne tribute band, which offers “The Ultimate Ozzy Experience.” Type the correct address and you will be introduced to a new monthly print magazine that is dedicated to “the concept of the Inherent Good” and features substantial essays, reviews, and creative writing of all kinds. Among the quirky features that will likely give unsuspecting readers that Dave Eggers feeling—the Believer is published by McSweeney’s Publishing, the imprint founded by the best-selling author—is Idea Share, a page offering ideas for books, stories, or other creative works “from those who can’t act upon them.”
Partisan Review (www.bu.edu/partisanreview), the quarterly literary magazine that published early writing by James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag, has ceased publication after 68 years. The final issue, released in April, is a tribute to cofounder William Phillips, who died in September 2002.
The current double issue of Mid-American Review (www.bgsu.edu/midamericanreview), the literary magazine published by the creative writing program at Bowling Green State University, is a celebration of Ohio’s bicentennial. The editors remind readers that among the writers who called the Buckeye State home were Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, O. Henry, John Crowe Ransom, and James Wright. Adding to the distinguished list, the Mid-American Review offers 357 pages of work by writers who have lived and written in Ohio—Rita Dove, Elton Glaser, John Kinsella, and Martin Lammon among them.
The results of a recent Poets & Writers Magazine opinion poll are in, and they ain’t pretty: Over half of the 1,000 readers who responded to the online poll do not subscribe to any literary magazines.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the Paris Review (www.parisreview.com), Picador recently published a 768-page anthology of writing that originally appeared in the quarterly journal edited by George Plimpton. The tome has a title to match its girth: The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, the Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953.
First there was One Story (www.one-story.com); now there is 32 Poems Magazine (www.32poems.com), the semiannual literary journal that features—you guessed it—32 poems in each small, lightweight, saddle-stitched issue. Edited by Deborah Ager and John Poch, the premiere issue, published in May, features poems by B.H. Fairchild, William Logan, C. Dale Young, and others.
Tin House (www.tinhouse.com) is celebrating its fourth anniversary with the publication of Bestial Noise: The Tin House Fiction Reader, a 400-page anthology of short stories that have appeared in the quarterly literary magazine based in Portland, Oregon. It’s an impressive collection, but for those readers who prefer a livelier celebration, Greg Connolly, bartender at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York City, has developed the Tin House Martini: “Pour 1/2 ounce of Pernod into a cocktail shaker. Swirl until it coats the inside of the shaker. Pour off any excess. Splash two eyedropperfuls of Cinzano dry vermouth into the bottom of the shaker, and again swirl it about, then pour off the excess. Pour 4 to 4 1/2 ounces of Tanqueray gin into the shaker, add ice, and with a long-handled silver mixing spoon, stir exactly 20 times. Pour the drink into a very well-chilled martini glass. Add three small cocktail olives, or two large ones, sans toothpick. The flavors of olive and Pernod commingle so deliciously that at least one of the olives should be consumed after the drink is finished.”
