Tin House :: NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines

Tin House

Publisher’s Description: Tin House is a literary magazine based in Portland, Oregon and New York City. The journal was conceived in the summer of 1998 by Portland publisher Win McCormack. He envisioned a journal that would be graphically appealing and free of the stale substance found in many contemporary journals. With this in mind, he enlisted the help of two experienced New York editors, Rob Spillman and Elissa Schappell, which resulted in a magazine that contains the energies of both coasts.

Rather than simply being dedicated to either fiction or poetry, Tin House excels in both, and it also publishes interviews with important literary figures, a "Lost and Found" section dedicated to exceptional public domain and generally overlooked material, and drink recipes. It is also distinguished from many other notable literary magazines by actively seeking work from previously unpublished writers for its "New Voices" section.

Recent issues:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge,” Einstein once said. His desire to open doors, to chart the world, dissect it, understand it, and make order out of chaos, echoes the experience of creation found in writing. Writers, too, work in solitude, inside their heads, solving problems and stitching together worlds. They calculate the geometry of human relationships, the velocity of a falling expectation, the force of a breaking heart. As with writing and science, the act of reading, at bottom, is about exploration, be it a microscope or a point of view, and being open to discovery. [13.3, Spring 2012]

This winter, we’re celebrating our 50th issue (13.2, Winter 2012) by exploring beauty in all its shades—from extreme and sexy, to subtle and strange. Michel Houellebecq finds tortured beauty in the world of art, Suzanne Lenzer draws our attention to the imperfect beauty of food, and A. N. Devers absorbs the haunting beauty of the stonemasonry at Tor House. There is the beauty of language in poetry by Heather Christle and Gary Jackson, and Aimee Bender talks with artist Amy Cutler about beauty across two different mediums. And what better way to put the whole elusive subject into perspective than with an essay from Marilynne Robinson?

Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch. Archimedes running through the streets of Syracuse shouting ‘Eureka’ in his birthday suit. Moments like these are the result of an emotional experience so intense it borders on madness: ecstasy. This fall, Tin House (13.1, Fall 2011) embraces the challenge of putting ecstasy into words, and from the spiritual to the chemical, no stone of transcendence goes unturned. Fiction from Nikolai Grozni, Kelly Link, and Jamie Quatro. Essays about a kung fu master, a temporal lobe epileptic, and a drugged out seeker. Plus, poetry from François Villon, Matthew Zapruder, and Meghan O’Rourke.