AGNI :: NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines

AGNI

Publisher’s Description: For over thirty-five years, AGNI has brought its readers the best national and international writing from established as well as emerging writers. In 2001 PEN America awarded Founding Editor Askold Melnyczuk its lifetime achievement award for magazine editing, saying, "Among readers around the world, AGNI is known for publishing important new writers early in their careers… AGNI has become one of America's, and the world's, most significant literary journals" and "a beacon of international literary culture." Ha Jin (1999 National Book Award), Jhumpa Lahiri (2000 Pulitzer Prize), and Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted) are but a few who appeared in our pages first or early on, alongside already famous names such as David Foster Wallace, Sharon Olds, and Seamus Heaney.

Housed at Boston University and edited since 2002 by essayist and literary critic Sven Birkerts, AGNI publishes two 240-page issues annually. AGNI Online (www.agnimagazine.org), an electronic complement to the print magazine, features weekly postings of new Web-only fiction, poetry, essays, and interviews. AGNI is a 501(c)(3) charitable corporation that relies on additional support from Boston University, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and a committed roster of individual donors (www.bu.edu/agni/friends-of-agni.html).

Recent issues:

#74: Sifting for fresh versions of the known. An art portfolio of odd objects, served up by Jody Servon and Lorene Delany-Ullman, captures something of the larger idiosyncrasy of this issue, which features, among other offerings, poetry by Amy Gerstler, Sherman Alexie, Carol Ann Davis, and Rainer Maria Rilke (from the German and from the French); fiction by Helen DeWitt and Rachel Swearingen; a generous array of nonfiction by Sarah Braunstein, Jonathan Wilson, Robert Boyers, and many others, as well as a conversation with the startlingly unusual Yahia Lababidi.

#73, Spring 2011:Tethers of mind, tethers of heart: a lyric inventory of the ties that bind, and constrain. Cover and portfolio by Ethan Murrow create the vibration, sustained and amplified in fiction by Ihab Hassan, Mark Slouka, Sigrid Nunez, Tom Whalen, and many others; poetry by Amy Beeder, Tom Sleigh, Patricia Lockwood, and Ed Ochester; and nonfiction by Nin Andrews and Matt Donovan.  Translations of Robert Walser, Giulio Mozzi, Paul Celan, and Horace.

#72: Anything-but-alphabetical Africa. A vividly variegated portfolio (in print and online) of fiction from the continent that Alexander miraculously overlooked, including new work from Henrietta Rose-Innes, Helon Habila, Doreen Baingana, and many others. The art feature and cover by Victor Ekpuk telegraph the sensuous immediacy and coded layers of this presentation. The issue also includes fiction by Joan Wickersham and Sarah Gaddis; poems by C. K. Williams, Kevin Young, Kate Northrop, and others; reflections on poetry by Carol Moldaw and Anton Vander Zee; as well as tributes to Barry Hannah by Sven Birkerts and William Giraldi.