The Sewanee Review :: NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines

The Sewanee Review

Publisher’s description: Take your rightful place in history and subscribe to the oldest continuously published literary quarterly in America. The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, is the home of this venerable quarterly, begun in 1892. The Sewanee Review is devoted to American and British fiction, poetry, and reviews, as well as essays in criticism and reminiscence. We invite you to take hold of the direct literary line to Flannery O’Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Hart Crane, Anne Sexton, Harry Crews, and Fred Chappell—not to mention, Andre Dubus and Cormac McCarthy, whose first stories were published in The Sewanee Review. Open this pale blue cover and you might find a chest of jewels or a powder keg. Each issue is a brilliant seminar, an unforgettable dinner party, an all-night swap of stories and passionate stances.

Recent issues:

We are proud to announce that the ninth issue (119.4, Fall 2011) of the SR devoted to the literature of war has arrived. The linchpin of many recent war issues has been a story from Phillip Parotti, and this one is no different: he gives us "Urns of Ash," set in the Trojan Wars, and reviews two books. We are also proud to introduce three newcomers to the Review: Kathleen Ford, Jeffrey N. Johnson, and John Woodington offer variations on the theme of war in their fiction. Johnson's "Lost Among the Hedgerows" was awarded this year's Andrew Nelson Lytle Fiction Prize.

There are many mansions in this house of fiction (119.3, Summer 2011), ranging from reviews of new work by Cynthia Ozick, John Banville, and Stewart O'Nan, to Merritt Moseley's annual scrutiny of the Booker Prize shortlist, to Laura Stevenson's erudite essay debunking the naivete of the first wave of bestselling writers for children, to Jeffrey Hart's dynamic argument that Wuthering Heights was one of the first Modernist fictions, all the way to D. H. Lawrence's discovery of American literature by A. Banerjee. New contributor, Philip Weinstein, weighs in on Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, while our occasional Revaluation series encourages readers to look beyond what's online, on Kindle, or even in print.

Our spring 2011 issue (119.2) revolves around the stories behind our best storytellers. Essays and reviews abound on Tennessee Williams, Alice Thomas Ellis, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Allen Tate, E. M. Forster, Lucretius, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Ernest Hemingway, John Berryman, Ty Cobb(!), theater critic Richard Gilman, and historian R. G. Collingwood. Poets muse on Sir Walter Raleigh, Emily Dickinson, and Geoffrey Chaucer. We catch glimpses into the always-interesting lives of some of our regular contributors: Russell Fraser, Stephen Miller, and Sam Pickering. Don't miss a featured story by Elizabeth Hynes or Fred C. Robinson's latest installment in our occasional series "The State of the Language."