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News
On Wednesday, Dec. 4, students, professors and friends gathered in the Brink faculty lounge to celebrate the official launch of “brink.,” the latest undergraduate student magazine produced by UI’s English department. The celebration featured pizza, sparkling cider and live readings from student contributors. The magazine is the product of the English 490 capstone course, in which seniors spent the entire semester brainstorming, organizing and producing content together. The result? A colorful, witty and heartfelt magazine demonstrating the skills and experiences these students obtained during their time in the English program. It contains self-reflections, fiction, poetry, photography and much more.
“brink.” is intended to be informative and inspirational. Articles within, such as “Top Ten English Classes at UI” and “What to Tell People When They Passive Aggressively Question Your Major,” are fond reads for those that have undergone the English program. They also contain valuable information for incoming UI students. There are playful mock advertisements for on-campus resources, such as the Writing Center. There are even activities such as a “Major Reads” word search, playlists to listen to as you read each section and writing prompts for fiction, nonfiction and poetry.
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‘TIS that time of the year again, when avenues open up for the writer in you to make a debut. Come January, a lot of literary magazines open up their doors for aspiring and budding writers to submit their fiction and poetry. As a lover of fiction himself, this writer decided to do his fellow writers a solid and, apart from a quick curation, also include a few easy tips to ensure your submissions are accepted.
The best way, says Tanuj Solanki, founder-editor of the Bombay Literary Magazine, is to just read the guidelines. Do people not do that, we ask?
“Well,” he laughs, “our fiction submissions, for examples, are supposed to be between 2,000 to 7,000 words but people end up sending entire novellas. As a result, their entries are never read.” Fair, we think. What else? “It never helps to choose topicality over quality,” he adds. “We had stories around the COVID 19 lockdown when it was in effect, and about the Me Too movement before that, but in the effort to make it topical, the story itself was undercooked. ”Go on, then. Here are some lit mags you can send your submissions to. Thank us later.
The 2025 edition of firstwriter.com’s annual directory for writers has just been released, and is now available to buy in paperbook, with the ebook version set to follow in the New Year.
The directory is the perfect book for anyone searching for literary agents, book publishers, or magazines. It contains over 1,500 listings, including revised and updated listings from the 2024 edition, and over 300 brand new entries.
Articles
“Thomas Pynchon is a young writer, just twenty, who has previously published fiction in Epoch. He is a Cornell graduate and now lives in Seattle.”
Writers know that the time between when a piece is accepted by a literary magazine and when it is actually published can be rather protracted—my longest span was three years—and by the time Thomas Pynchon appeared in the Spring 1960 issue of The Kenyon Review, he was a still-young 23. He’d just graduated from Cornell, his time there split by a stint in the Navy. He worked for Boeing in Seattle—writing for Bomarc Service News, an internal newsletter.
Although tasked with writing technical pieces about anti-aircraft missiles, Pynchon was characteristically wry. In “The Mad Hatter and the Mercury Wetted Relays,” Pynchon informs readers that Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter had gone mad from “chronic mercurialism” or “hatter’s shakes,” which could affect Boeing workers if certain wire-wrapped glass capsules explode. “When dealing with mercury,” Pynchon warns, “even in small amounts, respect it and play it safe. Don’t become a ‘Mad Hatter,’ you might find it to be much more unpleasant than attending a mad tea party.”
The same jaunty rhythms mark “Entropy,” Pynchon’s story in The Kenyon Review. Although he would later dismiss the piece as an example of “overwriting,” something “too conceptual, too cute and remote,” the story is playfully chaotic—the type of glorious excess for which literary magazines are made.
For avid readers, sometimes books can lose their appeal. You might get burned out or are unable to find the joy in keeping up with all the latest book releases. You could take a break in reading altogether, but there are other opportunities to level up your reading skills while putting your eye for detail to good use. One of those opportunities to become a literary magazine reader.
I had the great privilege of reading for two literary magazines in the past — The Missouri Review and The Masters Review — and both experiences proved invaluable to me as a reader and writer. It opened up my eyes to the blood, sweat, and tears that editors and readers put into these small but mighty publications. From a writer’s perspective, it also created an added respect for editors.
The Moth may be departing, but there's no shortage of other outlets for writers seeking publication. Here are profiles of a few of them
Who, in their right mind, would start a literary magazine? Plenty of people, it would seem, if the growth in publishing outlets for new writers, particularly online, is to be believed. While they’re often seen as a kind of cottage industry, small literary magazines are part of a bigger picture.
They provide a temperature check of the cultural climate, they’re a resource for talent-scouting publishers and a first stop for the big names of the future. Sally Rooney’s work, for example, first appeared in The Stinging Fly (see panel) so their influence is often way out of proportion to their size.
We spoke to three journal editors at varying stages of the process to find out what possessed them to enter the perilous world of literary publishing.
At CNN, Leah Asmelash laments the demise of many “long-standing” literary magazines. “The Believer,” she writes, which was started in 2003, “was once at the top of the literary magazine game. A leading journal of art and culture, the Believer published the work of icons like Leslie Jamison, Nick Hornby and Anne Carson. It won awards, it launched careers.” But the University of Nevada, which has housed the magazine since 2017, announced that it was shutting it down: “In a statement explaining the decision, the dean of the school’s College of Liberal Arts called print publications like the Believer ‘a financially challenging endeavor.’”
Oh, boy. Leslie Jamison, an icon? The Believer, a publication that “launched careers”? The only thing missing here is some theme music and a “CNN exclusive” or two.
Asmelash goes on to write about a handful of literary magazines housed at universities with MFA programs that are also shutting down — the Alaska Quarterly Review and the Sycamore Review, among others. We get the predictable “It wasn’t always this way” about halfway through:
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