Each issue of True Story shines a spotlight on one nonfiction piece by one writer. As one of my favorite print magazines, I always look forward to finding out which each new issue's story will be. This year's issues have, among other stories, featured a neighborhood coming together to search for a missing woman with dementia ("Search Party" by Stewart Lawrence Sinclair), and a camp counselor reflecting on his treatment of a particular camper in the wake of a sex abuse scandal involving the camp where he was once a camper himself (“Unmolested” by Michael Lowenthal). Readers never really know what to expect with each issue, part of the beauty of the little, pocket-sized magazine.

The Tishman Review is a literary magazine chock-full of the literary goods. I mean, the thing is stacked with a stunning array of quality writing.

Terrain.org exists at the meeting place of natural and manmade, an online magazine on human nature and our place within the natural the world. Work is added to the website on a rolling basis, so there is always a chance for readers to encounter something new upon each visit. So far, this month provides new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for exploration, as well as a guest editorial: “Letter to America” by Barbara Hurd.

TriQuarterly’s Summer/Fall 2017 issue is rife with writing of a high literary caliber. The pieces in this issue are all exciting in their own way, and I found myself quite taken by a number of them. Many of the fiction pieces in this issue are stellar. Though the stories range in style from straight-up literary realism to magical realism with a touch of the surreal, the one thing they share in common is a strong emotional core.

Volume 19 Number 1 is the “True Crime” issue of Tin House, designed, according to Editor Rob Spillman, “as a way to engage our country’s voyeuristic obsession with rogues and outlaws.” While vintage scraps of American morbidity do feature in this issue—the Starkweather murders, the Kansas village made famous by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood—social justice and the criminal state share equal billing. In the latter poems and stories, black and brown lives are pulled apart by oppressive forces emboldened by a complicit public. The gateway to the issue, Sean Lewis’s portrait of record producer Phil Spector, is dark and almost whimsical, a perfect point of entry. Lewis replaces Spector’s head with tangled tape, evoking a wig worn at his trial, as well as the “confused mind” that would lead him to murder actress Lana Clarkson in 2003. 

Every month, it's a struggle not to pick up True Story and immediately begin reading as soon as the new issue arrives at the office. As a fan of both the little, single-author nonfiction magazine and true crime, Issue 7 reeled me in and refused to let go. I had to read the first few pages at my desk. While not for the faint of heart, Andrew Maynard deftly balances fact and feeling in this issue’s timely story "Take Your Son to Work Day.”

Unlike so many other literary magazines, Thrice Fiction is, in itself, a work of art. It captures the spirit of each piece of fiction within its pages through original artwork and bends the concept of “short fiction” to encompass truly creative works that defy traditional short story formats. Self-identified as an alternative zine, each page tells a unique story from a unique voice, illustrated with unique art.

The Fall 2016 issue of Tar River Poetry is filled with the work of experienced poets; each piece reveals an attention to form and function in a linguistic mélange of technique containing a bounty of literary treasures. The issue is one to keep by the bedside for easy access to multiple reads.

One of the many joys of my high school creative writing class was anticipating the daily writing prompt. Our teacher would surprise us every day with a unique topic to write about for five to ten minutes. The excitement and challenge of responding to these daily writing prompts showed me how skillful writers can take any theme and craft it into a well-written essay or poem. If you also know and appreciate the joy of exercising creative writing muscles, then you would enjoy reading THEMA, the theme-related journal. Every issue of THEMA has a distinct theme, which, according to their website, serves three goals: “One is to provide a stimulating forum for established and emerging literary and visual artists. The second is to serve as source material and inspiration for teachers of creative writing. The third is to provide readers with a unique and entertaining collection of stories, poems, art and photography.” The theme of the autumn 2016 issue is “The Neat Lady and the Colonel’s Overalls,” which was inspired by the poetry editor’s visit to a shopping mall. Talented writers answered the call to this quirky theme and present an offering of exciting short fiction and poetry.

If I’m being honest, what drew me in to the first issue of True Story, brought to you by the editors of Creative Nonfiction and In Fact Books, is that the inaugural story, “Fruitland” by Steven Kurutz, sounded intriguing, mysterious, and—well—like a fiction story I’d like to read. Two brothers, Donnie and Joe Emerson, recorded an album together in the late 70s. While a flop at the time, it was rediscovered by chance in 2008, catapulting them into belated fame and inevitably stirring up ghosts. As a true story, “Fruitland” ends up offering more to readers than a fictionalized “inspired by” story ever could.

The first issue of TQ Review defines itself as “a journal of trans and queer voices.” These are authors speaking from their experiences and divulging their fears. The authors don’t share victim stories or stories of triumph, but everything in between. These are the stories of people within the trans and queer communities laying bare their fears and vulnerabilities.

The fiction in TriQuarterly ranks among the best today, but whereas many journals contain excellent fiction of one variety, TriQuarterly’s strength lies in its diversity. Jonathan David’s hilarious “The Sub” tells the story of a horrendous substitute teacher through (mostly) anonymous letters from the students themselves. “The Sub” is (intentionally?) reminiscent of Donald Barthelme’s classic “The School.” The latter’s strength lies in how the stakes are raised, the former’s is in the variety of voices, the smart and the not-so, the misbehaving and the apple polishing, the liars and the too-honest.

Tin House continues their run of excellence with this superb issue – one of their finest. The hot-button piece is Steve Almond’s collection of responses to the hate mail he received as a result of quitting his position at Boston College in protest of Condoleezza Rice being named commencement speaker. The e-mails are shocking, and Almond’s responses vary from whip-smart to insightful to hilarious to scathing all the way to heartbreaking. Almond’s concern for Tom and Katie’s baby in the face of being compared – no, equated – to bin Laden and Zarqawi is touching.

Tampa Review does not look like a literary magazine. The size and shape of a children’s storybook, this hardcover journal elicits the same expectation of entertainment – some pictures, stories, perhaps a lesson or two. There are plenty of pictures, in all types of media. Charlee Brodsky photographs calves and feet, and Jim Daniels describes them in poetry in a series of four connected works. Daniels opens “Glow” with the memorable lines, “The scarred knees of the world / imagine their prayers might be / forgiven.”

This is my favorite issue of this handsome annual yet. It’s smartly edited, with a collection of pieces that seem very much to belong together and to belong in exactly the order in which they appear. The issue opens with a silver print by Jerry N. Uelsmann of a sky inside a hand holding up both a house and a naked shadowy figure looking to one side, but approaching the house. On the facing page, Kathleen Spivack’s poem, “Seeming to Happen,” concludes “I, who thought myself ‘indecisive,’ find indeed I was only waiting: / waiting for you, for me, for a path, for a way to walk into this / painting.”

Guest editor Kimiko Hahn has compiled a collection of poems and stories based on research, paintings, photographs, and other source materials, several essays about writers' relationships to influences and original sources, and lengthy contributors' notes describing the writers’ processes and approaches. Hahn provides an introduction to the issue in a poetry/theory style, "Notes Re: Trawl/Troll," and includes two poems of her own in the issue. As a reader who is partial to research-based writing, I was especially interested in this issue, but I am confident that readers with no particular connection to this type of work will find a great deal to appreciate here.

Typoetic.us is a play on words, on the url and its own name (Typoeticus: ending like so many Greek names with the -ticus), and just a downright playful poetry journal. But don’t take playful to mean light and frivolous; rather, playful in the way that us literarians appreciate. The featured writers skillfully play with language, sound, emotion, and experience, and as readers, we are invited along as playmates. With the variety of styles the editorial sense includes, no one is left out.

A beautiful hardcover issue, the 50th Anniversary Issue of Tampa Review is rich with colorful images and powerful contemporary writing. Though there is no set theme, each piece contains strong yearning from the characters or figures, bringing the reader close to intimate thoughts.

With three issues a year, publishing fiction, Thrice Fiction is up-front and in-your-face, and not just when it comes to what genre it publishes and when. Its content is just as in-your-face with larger-than-life writing, and with full-color art donning almost every page.

For their latest issue, the editors of Tin House have gone tribal, calling on some of their “favorite storytellers and poets” to help explain “what life is like in our contemporary tribes.” In creating their “Tribes” issue, they’ve assembled a trenchant and soulful collection of poetry, fiction, and essays that unsettle as they entertain, exploring the consolation and alienation of belonging or wanting to belong. Poetry from Tony Hoagland and Cate Marvin, fiction from Jess Walter and Julia Elliott, essays from Roxanne Gay and Molly Ringwald, as well as the work of many other well-known writers, all share communal space in this lively gathering of the literary tribes.

Tar River Poetry, published by East Carolina University, has featured work of established and emerging poets since 1978. This issue follows tradition and includes a substantial number of engaging poems. These predominantly brief, free verse poems are intellectually challenging yet accessible to a wide variety of readers. While these pieces vary in subject and stylistic mode, imagery remains strong throughout the collection. The best poems convey striking images, the kind that stay with a reader long after the last page of the journal is turned.

Tongue doesn’t claim to provide any answers, to provide stories that reveal them, but the editors “revel, instead, in poems and art at ease with a kind of ambivalent vulnerability.” And as I read this issue, I certainly felt that.

Temenos, the journal of Central Michigan University, is a Greek word that “refers both to the ancient Greek concept of sacred space and the Jungian ‘safe spot’ where one may bring the unconscious into the light of consciousness.” The editors say that their mission is to “bring to light works that are engaging, memorable, and fearless.”

Joan Fox’s Editor’s Note, entitled “Variety and Vision,” states that this inaugural issue “features poems of survival, defiance and hope; images of our Western landscape; and, works offering a world of beings—mountain lions, coyotes, doves, dragonflies, cockroaches, fleas, cats, dogs, pelicans, humans, machines, sunlight.” Indeed, Three Coyotes highlights the beauty of the natural world, whether it is through the medium of prose, poetry, or photography.

One of the steadiest journals of the past few years, Third Coast offers another set of quality poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction. If the consistency of Third Coast has become a bit expected, the work inside is anything but. One of Third Coast’s preoccupations, the natural world, is always viewed through an unfamiliar lens.

Editors Alexandra van de Kamp (U.S.) and Alberto Domínguez  (Spain), two of five co-editors between Madrid and New York, tell us this bilingual journal "attempts to demarcate an open, lyrical territory in which surprising relationships and uncanny connections may occur among different worlds and points of views." The work here does, indeed, reach beyond the mere distance between Manhattan and Madrid, offering an eclectic mix that is surprising and pleasing to find between one set of covers, from José  Saramago's speech to the World Social Forum in Brazil in 2002 "From Justice to Democracy by Way of Our Bells,” to Sarah Kennedy's quiet, painterly poem "Morning, with Tea.”

If there’s been a push as of late to break the glass ceiling of female graphic artists, then little magazines stand in the vanguard: this summer Marjane Satrapi was interviewed in The Believer; a little later, A Public Space came out with an excerpt from Lauren Redniss’s Century Girl. Now comes Tin House’s graphic issue, which goes further than either publication, featuring articles with Satrapi and earthy icon Lynda Barry (whose curiously scatological and entirely dualistic rumination on the nature of mental imagery graces the cover), and, later, a vignette on the dearth of female graphic artists. An interview with Satrapi follows, wherein this “queen” of graphic novels discusses how she reworked the flurry of misconceptions surrounding her Iranian heritage into the intelligent, darkly humorous Persepolis, now the subject of a movie deal.

This thirtieth anniversary issue of the magazine (noted only on the cover, no grand recapping of great accomplishments or even an editorial remark on the milestone publication) is like every issue that has preceded it and, let us hope, every one that will follow – intelligent. I count on the The Threepenny Review to reassure me that there are intelligent voices, thoughtful and critical minds, broadly educated thinkers, careful writers, and intellectually viable perspectives producing consistently high quality work that doesn’t seek to grab attention, shore up trends, or even to set them.

Thema, the literary journal that boasts “many plots/one premise,” stepped into the kitchen for this edition. Editor Virginia Howard, drawing on memories of her time at a New Orleans bed and breakfast, called for short stories, poems, and artwork “varied as a recipe collection in a cookbook . . . concocted from a wide variety of ingredients for the theme ‘In Kay’s Kitchen’.” The result is a delightful compilation of five illustrations, eight poems, and eleven stories that transport readers into the various interpretations of Kay’s kitchen.

I had a sense of déjà vu while reading The Tampa Review. I held the large slim 7x11 hardcover and remembered beautifully illustrated fairy tales books from my childhood. Although The Tampa Review is not filled with whimsical tales, the cover artwork by Florida artist James Rosenquist along with the black and white photos in the journal creates a book of beauty.

Anne Carson, Gary Shhteyngart, and Mark Doty, all in this issue! There's also a wonderful story ("The Red Fox Fur Coat") by Teolinda Gersao, translated from the Portuguese by Margert Jull Costa, who also contributes a translation of an essay on Faulkner by Javier Marías, outstanding book essays by P.N. Furbank (on Geoffrey Hill's Style and Faith) and Rachel Cohen (on a new edition of Rilke's Letters On Cézanne), and C.K. Williams on Lowell's Collected Poems, comparing poets to composers: "…that there are elements in the poems that I don't care for, or even have to forgive, is incidental to the elemental experience of being taken again by Lowell's singularly gratifying music." The prose is accompanied by marvelous poems.

Tabloid sized, with its impressive, glossy jacket and hard cover, Tampa Review always feels like an extravagant gift (especially considering its unbelievably reasonable price).

Interviewers Amanda Rachelle Warren and Roy Seeger ask terrific questions of Mary Ruefle whose terrific answers include this characterization of a writer's work: "…an artist…is on a very personal journey in an extremely un-personal world." Fortunately, the sixteen poets, seven fiction writers, and three creative nonfiction contributors represented here know how to link the personal and "un-personal" to bring us work that is both fresh (as in honest and authentic) and refreshingly free of gimmicks and empty rhetorical devices.

I wish there were more "international journals" and am pleased to see that this one has survived another year to bring us a fresh new issue. An eclectic and generous editorial vision brings together spectacular photographs of Palenque on the Atlantic coast of Colombia by Oscar Frasser with a respectful view of the "precarious and disadvantageous conditions" of the region, a previously unpublished interview with Paul Bowles (who died in 1999) conducted by Ramon Singh, a journalist, fiction writer, and teacher of American literature who currently lives in Greece, elegant, powerful drawings of the human form by award-winning artist Jeffrey Barrera of Madrid, as well as poems, prose poems, stories, a scholarly essay, a political manifesto, and other offerings in the "galería del arte."

A quick glance at the Contributors Notes of the Spring 2009 issue of Third Coast reads like a promotional pamphlet for the country’s top MFA programs. Coast to coast, nearly every school is represented, the teachers of writing, the recent graduates, those still pursuing the elusive MFA or PhD. Yet, despite the ongoing rant that too many MFA graduates will inevitably result in the generic poem or prose, this issue serves as a glorious contradiction. Occupying nearly 200 pages of text, a total of 28 poets writing 36 poems, 15 prose writers writing 6 short stories, 2 creative non-fiction pieces, 1 play, and several reviews for a recommended books section, I applaud the editors of Third Coast for their wonderful diversity of taste, for their willingness to publish both the well established and the newly emerging, for their particular caliber of excellence. This issue provides a little something for everyone in pursuit of a satisfying read.

Tiny Lights comes out of Petaluma, California. It may have “tiny” in its title, and it may have only sixteen stapled pages between its newsprint covers, but “lights” are everywhere in its pages. This issue—which was published in the summer of 2011—contains the winning entries in the “standard” and “flashpoint” categories of its annual essay contest, plus submissions by readers to two regular “columns.” The whole issue can be read in an hour. And what a pleasant, rewarding hour it is. Susan Bono, the founder and editor of this tiny journal, loves personal essay and personal voice, and the magazine is a vehicle for this love.

This issue, titled “Science Fair,” does something remarkable. That’s not news for Tin House, which is known for being remarkable in regard to its high literary quality and appealing, light-filled design. But this issue is uniquely wonderful because it shows in a variety of ways how literature, which you love, and words, which transport you, are all intertwined with the materiality of science—and that’s not all science fiction (though there are some wonderful examples of that). It makes science mysteriously accessible to those of us who revel in metaphor and myth. It makes metaphor and myth accessible to science-eaters by showing them how one came out of the other, how both are in us, both make us what we are.

This journal from the University of Northern Arizona is, as the title indicates, thin (only 78 pages), but it is dense with works that push the boundaries of fiction and poetry. Sometimes weird, often times experimental, and certainly not boring, Thin Air is a little, big journal that deserves attention.

Think. Think. Think. A bold title, Think Journal’s very name is a promise to its readers. As Editor Christine Yurick says, “I am drawn to work where something happens, something more than a fleeting moment of insignificance, something with depth and importance.” Something that makes you think. It’s a promise that is fulfilled. There’s no lack of action or rumination in this journal, which is certainly something worth applauding. Think Journal publishes pretty much any genre by emerging and established writers. Its writers ask you to think about issues that are both personal and universal – love, desire, grief, etc.

The editor of the first issue of Trachodon, named after a dinosaur that never existed, writes in his editor’s note, “I want TRACHODON the magazine…to be this weird, sort of impossible thing. Something that’s up for debate because it’s always leaning a little toward the unreasonable. And, maybe, to be something that’s never quite finished.”

This is a tiny little journal, literally, despite its large ambitions—“this journal is designed as an opportunity to bask in the general shiftiness of translation…serves as a home to foreign poetry, as a tool for developing new work, and as an experiment in translation,” the editors tell us—Telephone fits snugly in one palm. This inaugural issue features the work of Berlin poet Uljana Wolf whose original five poems serve as a “jumping-off point” for more than a dozen poets writing in English, including Mary Jo Bang, Matthea Harvey, Robert Fitterman, Erin Moure, and Craig Santos Perez, among others.

Celebrations, gatherings, affairs, factions, feasts, salons, unions, orgies, sects, partners, leagues, cabals, defendants, accomplices, holidays, conspirators, partakers — the definition of "parties" for this tenth volume of the journal. TWO LINES is an engrossing theme-based journal of poems in translation, published by the Center for Art in Translation in San Francisco. It's beautifully and cleverly done and, to its credit, includes only work published for the first time in English in North America. The historical framework is as expansive as the geographical scope, with poems from ancient times to the current moment. Poets include a few writers who may be well known to readers in the U.S. and many who certainly remain unknown here were it not for TWO LINES. All of the poems appear in their original language (Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, French from France and Senegal,  Finnish, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Provençal, Spanish from several Latin American countries, Uzbek, and more) and in translation, preceded by a bio of the poet and a short commentary from the translator about the process of creating the translation. Brief contributors' notes at the back of the journal provide the translators' bios.

If you’re a literary traditionalist or an anal grammar/perfect-proof reader, leave. You’ll hate this publication. For the remaining (more forgiving) folks, let’s talk. The first section is a bit rough. I swear someone lost pages to the Manil Suri (“Death of Vishnu”) interview. But the “Letters to the Editor” start the engine purring. Look at these beginning sentences: "I love the rain / As a schoolgirl, I read the story of Hero and Leander for the first time in Arabic / I believe that human beings everywhere share similar joys and sorrows."

This issue opens with a Q & A of poet Juliana Baggott, who has several poems featured here. Her responses are quick-witted and funny, quite, I imagine, as you’d expect a poet’s to be. When asked why she doesn’t write formal poetry, she responds, “I mistake quatrain for Coltrane, terza rima for tiramisu,” and, while she agrees that “there is desperation in numbers, an attempt to keep account like naming babies in an orphanage hospital,” she admits that she will “forever 1-2-3 a waltz.” Witty indeed, and her poems - beautifully imagined and written. For example, in “The Stolen Poem: My Brother Poem after Levine’s ‘What Work Is’,” she writes, “He won’t admit to rain. Only / A break in the sun to wait out / My brother wait for it to unwind / amid the no-no of children, jazz, Scotch.”

In their submission guidelines, the editors of this crime and noir website are aggressively specific about what they are looking for: “Please have crime, violence, murder, mayhem and chaos. Or a monkey.” But they don’t like serial killer stories or tales with hitmen because both have been overused. (I didn’t know that. You learn something every day.) And they would like the writer to think outside of the box.

If you don't already know, Thema is a journal whose every issue is based on a different premise, upon which the poetry, fiction, and photography reflect. This issue's theme is "Hey, Watch This!"

Tin House Editor Rob Spillman’s announcement that until 2011 unsolicited submissions will not be considered unless they are accompanied by a receipt for the recent purchase of a new book or literary magazine seems both in keeping with – and in some ways contrary to – the needs, concerns, issues, perspectives, realities, and experiences that surface in the poems, stories, essays, and interview that extrapolate on this issue’s theme, “Class in America.”

This is an unassuming bi-annual, modestly staple-bound and graphic-less.

“Humans love to lie,” notes editor Win McCormack of Tin House Magazine.

I wish more magazines were like this one. This always-a-theme-issue journal features a spectacular theme this time, “off on a tangent,” and the pieces featured here are just what I like—tangential, surprising, rarely staying in one place for too long.

Tameme is a bilingual journal of new writing from North America.

The editor of Thema announces themes a year or more in advance. So, when Virginia Howard chose “When Things Get Back to Normal” thinking of her house and her life in Louisiana in the post-Katrina years, she could not possibly have known how much many more of us would be longing for “normal” in Autumn 2008. “For us, things will never get back to normal. We are trying to forge new versions of normal,” she writes in her introductory notes.

I’m going to refer to this publication as a “class in a book” for its incredible depth and breadth of content (in only 78 pages); ambitious would be an understatement. Transference is a new journal of poetry in translation published by the Western Michigan University’s Department of World Languages and Literature, which includes Arabic, Chinese, French, Old French, Classical Greek, Latin, Japanese, and Russian.

As a south Texas native who relocated from the state in 1966, I immediately associate the town of Huntsville with its state prison. The Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville is the oldest of the state’s prisons, having been in operation since 1849. The unit boasts two distinctions: it houses the execution chamber where the largest number of prisoner executions in the United States are carried out, and from 1931 through 1986 it sponsored the Texas State Prison Rodeo. The rodeo arena was razed in early 2012, marking the end of a colorful piece of Texas history. Today, according to the Texas prison inmates’ handbook, the authorized team sports available to prisoners are softball, volleyball, and baseball.

If you are a starving artist, take $22 from your last hundred bucks and purchase a subscription to Tampa Review. Every time you behold the volumes, you will feel rich. This journal is one of the most lavish and beautiful publications in the world of literary magazines. Hardcover, with a four-color dust jacket and visual art throughout, the large-format Tampa Review is an instantaneous wow. The dust jacket flaps contain an eloquent orientation to the content, indicating the editorial goal of creating an integrated experience within each single issue. Contributor notes are relatively lavish, providing almost five pages of information about the 55 artists and writers represented in this issue.

Because theNewerYork is a different breed of literary magazine entirely (“We are changing the publishing world,” the website states), it’s only fitting to go with an unconventional review, in this case, “An Imagined Instructional Editorial List (in Review)”:

The third issue (v2n1) of Tuesday; An Art Project comes in a plain, thick, yellow wrapper. Inside is the table of contents, a feature poem, short bios of the authors, editorial information, and – most importantly – cards and postcards containing the poems, prints and photographs. There are only seventeen cards, and they are all striking.

Tiferet is an independent “multi-faith publication dedicated to promoting peace in the individual and in the world,” published six times annually (two print issues and four online issues). Issue 13 features five essays (most are excerpts from forthcoming or recently published books); three short stories; the work of a dozen poets; black and white photographs by Taoli-Ambika Talwar and a drawing by Israel Carlos Lomovasky. The large format is ideal for Talwar’s exceptional photographs, three images that couldn’t be more different from each other (a close-up of a blossom; a distanced view of a house in the woods; and a close-up of a wall of granite rock), except for the skill and creativity of their composition.

This “Wild” issue of Tin House is special in that it contains both cover art and a feature from Matt Kish’s illustrated version of Conrad’s classic Heart of Darkness. As usual, Tin House features great work from poets, fiction writers, essayists, and reviewers. It has everything from essays on Vegas brothels or snakes to a “Readable Feast” that ends with a recipe for barnacles. Fair warning though, with a cover this visually stunning, you may never be able to actually open it.

The blood red cover announces this volume's theme "Blood/Le Sang," as well as this Canadian journal's bilingual presentation. The Canadians are leaders in feminist writing that crosses "the boundary between creative and theoretical texts," and this issue's introductory essay by editors Martine Delvaux and Catherine Mavrikakis is an excellent example. This exciting work links personal story and reflection, ideas about the meaning of "blood relations" and the language and uses of blood from writers and philosophers and religious texts, and explores the meaning(s) of "blood" in advertising and social interactions ("Blood. It's in you to give" – from the Blood Services of Canada). Alternating between French and English, Delvaux and Mavrikakis’ piece sets the stage for the essays, poems, other prose texts, and artwork that follow.

Guest editor Henry S. Bienen’s theme is “the other,” the “real or presumed differences” between us, which he categorizes, by way of partial example, as: race religion, language, country of origin or birth, region, geography, clan, tribe, caste, family, class, social status, income, occupation, age, gender, sexual preference, style of dress, or hairstyle. He has selected nine essays, four stories, the work of three poets, a powerful portfolio of photos by Fazal Sheikh, and additional photos by Jeremiah Ostriker, all of whom convert these categories of identity into work that reflects these definitions’ inadequacy when it comes to knowing the real people and circumstances of which our diverse world is comprised.

This is the “political issue,” which I am reading just prior to the election, and I am, paradoxically, glad, almost relieved to find the sad ironies (The title page quotes John F. Kennedy, “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war”), popular truths (the Editor’s Note begins with the old bumper sticker adage, “If you’re not pissed off, you’re not paying attention."), and delighted to find that Tin House is as provocative as ever, especially when we need it most.

A little of this, a little of that, effectively used white space, not over-crowded by images or advertisements, Tin House provides for a generally pleasant read. This issue of Tin House is subtitled “The Ecstatic.” This, along with the sheer caliber of her writing, explains the inclusion of Kelly Link’s “The Summer People” in this issue. Her characters are most definitely of ecstatic stock.

Always handsome and beautifully printed, this year’s edition features, for the first time, visual art from the nineteenth century reproduced from the Tampa Book Arts Studio Library, and it’s glorious. Oil paintings, illustrations, drawings, a color letterpress print, the cover of a blank writing book, and engravings in a broad range of styles. The Tampa Review’s large format provides an appropriate platform for these works, and they are carefully selected to be appropriate in their placement alongside the literary works.

The Feral Issue. That’s right feral. In other words: animal studies. Guest editor Heather Steffen introduces this special feature section by explaining that animal studies has assumed increasing prominence over the last decade, but that our preoccupation with non-human animals is probably as old as the first human. As for this feral issue of the magazine, “if it has a leaning, it is to build a cultural materialist account of animals in our world…a cluster of essays that look at animals in literature, theory, the military, law, cultural history, and food production.” The work varies widely from personal accounts of relationships to animals and their larger implications, as in John Fried’s “This Treatment Isn’t in Any Way Cruel,” to analysis of the writing of Kenneth Burke by the guest editor, to an interview with vegan eco-feminist writer Carol J. Adams. A wide range of views and perspectives through essays, poems, short fiction, interviews, and reviews of animal studies publications is presented and offer the reader an excellent introduction to this growing field.

Showcasing fourteen poets, Thrush emphasizes melody found in poetry. The magazine takes its name from the thrush, a species of bird whose songs are, regarded by some, the most beautiful in the world. “We love that and that is how we feel about poems,” say the editors. “We hope to provide you with the best poetry available to us.”

A great literary magazine is one that makes you think and ponder and take several moments out of your busy life to just appreciate art and life. Thema offers some absolutely remarkable writing that grabbed me and forced me to sit and reread several times. I found myself thinking about the economy, relationships, writing, reading, art, and even the galaxy at large.

Halfway through The Tusculum Review, I feel like I have to come up for air: so much of it seems to take place in a small space, i.e., the writers’ and the characters’ heads. The poems jump from one time or image or location to another within the space of two lines, though individual sentences and fragments offer the occasional reward. Some of the essays are entirely cerebral, while others are a more traditional mix of storytelling and meditation. The stories, while mostly well-written, don’t quite hit the mark, and I’m left wondering: is there more?

Tuesday; An Art Project may technically be a literary journal; however, ‘art project’ describes it so much better. It arrives as a series of postcard-like cards, printed on one or both sides, with poems, photographs or prints, well wrapped in sturdy, folded, thick, almost cardboard-like paper. The title and subtitle are neatly printed on one side of the wrapper, the names of the authors and artists on the other, plus the subscription price. It unfolds to display a table of contents inside, plus a list of editors, advisory board, detailed background description of the artists and authors, a featured poem, and, the cards themselves. There are eighteen sturdy, pure-white, five-by-seven-inch cards; fourteen contain poems, four display photographs.

The debut of a journal brings tentative excitement to the entrenched literary scene. Can a newbie survive a crowded marketplace funded largely by ego? What distinctive editorial vision will buoy the perils of distribution, promotion, and un(der)appreciation? Some sink, some sail, but the masthead of the second issue of Thereby Hangs a Tale includes the crew’s superpowers, which can only help. Based out of Portland, Oregon, the slender, black-and-white journal runs regular sections, like Tales Told (nonfiction), Tall Tales (fiction), Rants, a closing We ♥ Libraries, and a journal-entry-like sprinkling of revelations. The editors call it an art project; the content, like the contributors who range from novelists to retirees, is free of literary pretensions and silly snobbery.

Gorgeousness. This magazine looks beautiful with its elegant matte cover and the generously laid-out pages. I found the reading experience luxurious, too. Usually I read literary magazines during the day and my private books in the evening, for pleasure. When I picked up TriQuarterly in the evening, I knew I had found a treat.

For TriQuarterly, one of Chicago’s many estimable literary venues, their 125th issue is surprisingly erratic. It allows Moria Crone’s flat, turgid “The Ice Garden” to consume nearly 30 pages, and David Kirby’s initial travelogue/essay to proffer descriptions of how we consider sex: “The question is a loaded one, and the gun that fires it is double-barreled, for nothing is more wonderful than sex and nothing more tawdry, nothing more elevating yet nothing more degrading.”

A magazine’s readership can be found in its advertisements. MFA programs listing esteemed writing faculty spot the pages of The Threepenny Review, a quarterly, newspaper-styled arts chronicle. There is a high-brow academic element to the review, but it’s balanced by questioning yet incisive prose.

This issue of Terrain features the winners and finalists for the magazine’s third annual contest—in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Themed “ruin + renewal,” the issue is filled with stories of survival and growth amongst the destroyed, the decayed, and the dirty.

Tipton Poetry Journal is a small, stapled, chapbook-like (in appearance) publication featuring “poetry from Indiana and around the world.” This issue’s 44 pages include the work of three-dozen poets. While I was not familiar with these poets, all have substantial publication credits in a wide variety of journals and several have authored full-length collections and/or novels.

This issue of Tin House contains writing that is as vivid and entertaining as its bright pink cover. In the editor’s note, Rob Spillman explains what his magazine looks for in a story or poem: “To see things anew, to be reminded of what it is to be alive.” Sounds like a large ambition, but the selection of stories, poems, essays, and book reviews in this magazine provide just that.

Tin House is thick – 200 pages – and it contains enough variety and ingenuity to enthrall even the pickiest reader.

This issue is guest edited by Leigh Buchanan Bienen, a senior lecturer at Northwestern University School of Law, and author of the collection of short stories The Left Handed Marriage. The issue is devoted entirely to theater-related essays and analysis, beginning with the editor’s essay, “Art, and the Art of Teaching,” which traces her own journey from literature to law to theater and back to fiction again and finally to a consideration of the teaching of art (in the largest definition of the word) in the context of the world’s dramatic – and unacceptably traumatic – realities: “If art is going to survive, people do have to stop killing one another, on the small and large scale, and beating up on one another, on the small and large scale, and learn to look at each other.” Finally, she equates the classroom and the theater, and by extension the space in which we perform our daily lives, too: “The real questions cannot be asked or answered alone, and they are asked most powerfully, when we listen knowing that others are listening with us at the same time, in a darkened space.”

Consistently one of the best, cleanest-looking, most affordable and most interesting literary magazines, Third Coast seems incapable of ever making a bad move. If you go to it for your fix of Bob Hicok, for example, you might get distracted by a story by Kieth Banner - lines like “I love her like you might love a stubbed toe if the rest of your body was numb.”

I don’t read literary journals for the reviews they publish, and I’m a little surprised to find myself mentioning them here—in a review. But I have to say that the three reviews in Tar River Poetry are themselves as compelling as the poetry in this small volume. Richard Simpson, Susan Elizabeth Howe and Thomas Reiter present careful, academic discussions of three new poetry volumes, discussions that presume a well-educated but not necessarily scholarly audience. Informative and never pompous, they are a pleasure to read.

Editor RW Spryszak begins this issue of Thrice Fiction by addressing the misconceptions some have with regard to “micro fiction.” Spryszak rejects the notion that flash fiction is “experimental” and has a very good point. “Experimental” implies that a piece isn’t fully formed “or that the writer doesn’t know what they’re trying to get at . . . by the time something is ready for public viewing the experiment should be over.” The writers whose work is represented in Thrice Fiction make use of the toolboxes of both poets and short story writers to create stories that are as emotionally potent as they are brief.

The cool thing about THEMA is that prompt thing. Each issue of this cleverly-conceived magazine offers one premise (the prompt) and solicits whatever plots, poems, images and issues writers can come up with from that opening. Now, I don’t mean the opening or beginning of the story. I mean that opening into the imagination, that one key into story or wordplay. THEMA's threefold goal is: “to provide a stimulating forum for established and emerging literary artists […] to serve as source material and inspiration for teachers of creative writing [ . . . ] [and] to provide readers with a unique and entertaining collection of stories and poems.” The theme for the summer issue was “About two miles down the road.” What would you come up with for that?

This issue continues the quarterly magazine’s tradition of intelligent, accessible writing over a wide range of topics in the arts and literature, in addition to high-quality poetry and fiction. As a previous NewPages reviewer commented, “It’s a bit like the New Yorker, only without the self-importance and the umlauts.”

Third Coast, “founded in 1995 by graduate students of the Western Michigan University English department,” invites its readers into personal narratives, imaginative lyricism, and in-depth interviews for its Fall 2011 publication. Editor Emily J. Stinson compiled a collection of creative poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, drama, an interview, and reviews that resulted in an experience that takes us through the fire of creative minds. Its features fiction first-place winner, Sarah Elizabeth Schantz, first-place poetry winner, Jennifer Perrine, and thirty-two other polished writers who leave the reader feeling closer to understanding the depth, cruelty, and beauty of human nature.

I’m the type of girl who crushes on poets, hard. If Robert Frost was still kicking, I’d be tripping through his shrubbery as we speak. So I was pretty excited to open the Fall 2011 issue of Tar River Poetry (TRP) and see Sherman Alexie hanging out in the contents. Yes, please, I thought. Little did I know I’d close this magazine with a handful of new love interests. Yup, I’m that girl.

Tampa Review is a literary magazine published with glossy pages and hardcover binding. Elegant, but not exclusive, connections to the Tampa Bay region in Florida emerge. You can hear the brackish river boiling up in the valley in some of the poems, and taste the mist of the Gulf of Mexico estuary in some of the raw fiction. As for presentation, as the old joke goes about Playboy, “I read it for the articles,” but found the art to reflect a certain careful sensibility, an allegiance to the editorial insofar that there was a basic realism bearing with it the promise of extended interpretation.

There is a certain perversity in newspaper-bound journals—after all, how can something as valuable as literature exist in such a vulnerable state, resembling Sunday-edition inserts destined, unread, for the recycling bin. Accustomed to the pretty, diminutive books that populate the same category, I was immediately disarmed by the lackluster appearance of The Threepenny Review. 

Only on their second issue, the editors of Treehouse are off to a great start. Called an “online magazine for short, good writing,” this issue of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry does justice to its tagline.

Toad Suck Review has exploded with success since its debut issue in 2011. Volume 2 is titled “Obey” and follows well on the heels of a remarkable first issue. The table of contents is enough to lure you into a very different and fun structure. Included are: Nonfixion, High-Octane Poetix, Artist-in-Residence Features, Fixion, Translation, Eco-Edge, Critical Intel, and much more. This magazine features not only current writers, but honors great past writers as well. Everything is woven into an incredibly enjoyable read that leaves breadcrumbs along the way to find more where that came from.

Published twice a year, the Tulane Review is a student-run literary and art journal published by the Tulane Literary Society, which claims on its website to be the “hub of all literary activity” on the Tulane University campus in New Orleans. Nestled in the uptown section of the Crescent City, near where the Mississippi River snakes so tightly it nearly doubles back on itself, Tulane University is itself a hub of literary activity. The works of the forty-seven writers and artists published in this edition are like the intermingling effluents of the hundreds of rivers and tributaries that stream together in the Mississippi River.

The recently published “Summer Reading” issue of Tin House is… well, it is…

The summer issue of Tin House: cue an essay on “miserablism”—not in music, as Simon Reynolds once used to describe Morrissey and other gloomy Manchester bands but in fiction, as Gerald Howard employs in an essay on the “Merritt Parkway Novel.” More on that later, but let that brief introduction to this issue suffice to say that this isn’t exactly light-hearted beach reading. Who wants that anyways? The editor’s note says, “Consider this summer reading as providing a few grains of sand in your suntan lotion, a little bit of grit to remind of you the depth and breadth of the human condition.” So, let this Tin House do just that—give a dark, realistic, take on summer reading.

After only seconds on the site, what immediately drew me in was the scrolling images of art by Trent Manning—who works with mixed media and recycled materials—and Jon Rodriguez. In an interview with Rodriguez, the Tampa Review Online asks about the inspiration behind his “seemingly tragic” characters, to which he replies “Each character has their own distinct traits that reflect different aspects that mirror where I’m currently at in life. Some are hopeful and some are tragic. These characters act as a way to share a deep truth about myself, in hopes of helping people see a truth in them.” And this is certainly true for writers as well as we pick up on our own lives and emotions to inspire our work.

This new upstart journal from my hometown of Seattle has already garnered national attention and deservedly so. Newcomers crowd the pages next to the occasional more well-known names like Lyn Lifshin and Joshua Marie Wilkinson, and the mix of poetry and prose, with interspersed black-and-white art work, is intense and surprising.

The Tusculum Review plunges into an odyssey of self-reflection, confession, and recollection. The review calls itself, "an annual venue for new voices," and each voice within its pages is entirely unique from its counterparts. The sampling highlights a fusion of character voices within the short stories, drama, poetry, and illustrations; each piece retains a beautifully rendered resonance to its own statement.

The contributors of this highly-regarded publication hail from all over the world, but the sensibility is very much of its place of origin, Berkeley, CA. The sense of place and identity are pervasive.

In this issue, a lot of the pieces seem to deal with a void, something missing. Take “Absence” by Sarah Clayville: “You only wake for silence. The absence of a baby’s cry, the silence of my womb no more capable of speaking up to you than I am.” And “Eating Now” by Andy Cochran: “I consider telling him how I woke up hearing her voice. How it faded. How losing her voice felt like losing her all over again.” And Marchell Dyon’s poem: “Sometimes I wish I could be as vacant from emotions as the moon. / To be just another spirit free to wander.”

This captivating journal presents essays, poems and stories in their original language side by side with their English translations and notes from the translators.

This new saddle-stitched journal of poetry and art out of Tennessee gives a forum for newer voices, with a lyric bent. I liked the ekphrastic poem “Shark Infested Waters” by Gayle Elen Harvey (about a show by Damien Hirst), as well as P.J. Taylor’s “The Mice and The Lemon Tree.” An excerpt of Taylor’s poem:

Something about a Southern poetry journal, especially one with cream-colored pages and chapbook binding, makes the day pass by slowly. Tar River Poetry is never morbid, never too light, often ironic, often chatty like a friend sitting on the porch during a barbecue. I love, for example, the assonance of William Trowbridge’s “Foolish Tears”: “Tonight, Fool’s sobs / blort through the dark as dog’s bark and big rigs / blast across the overpass.”

“An international magazine of ideas and opinions, emphasizing literature and the arts” – that is how the editors describe tnr. The front cover exhibits delicate pink petals, aside thistles, against a brick cross – beauty, troubles and truth. Art this journal has in abundance – photographs, reproductions of paintings, watercolors, drawings – all very stylish and in color.

A glance at the Tampa Review’s website reveals that it is published in hardback, and that it seeks to combine various arts to carry on the “tradition of illuminated manuscripts.” This edition of TR’s “gallery space in print,” offers journalistic photos by Peter Andrew Bosch and David Swanson to illuminate J. Malcolm Garcia’s “Encountering Afghanistan.” An image of Hanneke Beaumont’s bronze sculpture of a runner kneeling fits well with Mark Baumgartner’s story “Some Miles Back.”

I love unassuming journals: those thinner, saddle-stitched endeavors with so few people working behind the scenes, I can count them on one hand. Some border on zine rather than lit mag, and it can be a hard call. With this publication, there is no question that this publication is right up there with much larger-staffed literary endeavors. With full-color throughout – photos, artwork, page design – this “little” publication is a huge feast for the eyes. As plagues fine art reproductions, however, there are some issues with resolution that I wish could be resolved, rather than holding the image at an arm’s length to limit the blur. The written works, poetry and fiction, are not to be held at arm’s length, but brought into close range. Not one piece in here I didn’t like for at least a line or stanza or image or feeling it dragged into me and out of me.

“If you’re not seized by dread you’re not paying attention.” “We are now recognizing each other’s humanity, are connected and transformed by each other’s experiences. Or so we hope.” Do these statements contradict each other? Yes! Do they represent the realistic dichotomy of American life in the current moment? Yes! Do they summarize the dual themes of “dread” and “hope” that organize the work in this issue of Tin House? Yes!

Winners of the Third Coast fiction and poetry contests are announced on the first pages of this issue, with a justification for their choices written by judges Stuart Dybek (fiction) and David Rivard (poetry). The gambler in me skipped those pages and went right into the content of the magazine hoping to suss out the winning pieces. Would anything distinguish their work from regular submissions, except they got publication and a thousand bucks for their effort? Maybe it was the frame of mind in which I read, or the preference of the editors, but there seems an element of risk, physical and spiritual, running throughout the writing in this issue.

This issue of Thin Air opens with a hilarious poem about fire, which, by rights, shouldn’t be funny at all. But Matthew J Spireng’s poem “In Case of Fire” will have you smiling by its end. Spireng writes,

A young journal — this is just the third issue — Tiferet has the solidity and self-assuredness of a more seasoned publication and its approach to “spiritual literature” is expansive. Take, for example, this poem by Helen Marie Casey, “Loaves and Pears”:

The contributors list for The Threepenny Review reads like a Who’s Who of the literary world, with contributions in this issue alone by A.L. Kennedy, W.S. DiPiero, Jill McDonough and Anne Carson. The poetry and fiction featured in this issue impress with beauty and simplicity—you won’t need to Google a thing.

Tin House is celebrating its tenth anniversary, but it is the reader who receives the birthday present. The editors celebrate “art that provokes intense emotion,” presenting both psychologically potent stories and poems and interviews that invite the reader to reflect upon their own understanding of art. The top-notch graphic design, with full-bleed photograph pages before each story, makes the stories that much more inviting.

If you’re a poetry reader, you’ll recognize many names here (John Balaban, Nicholas Samaras, Sydney Lea, Gloria Vando) and be pleased to see their new work. And you’ll be pleased, too, with the quality of the work presented by poets whose names you may not necessarily recognize (Shannon Ward, Patrick Hicks, Caleb Beissert) and then most especially with the fine reviews by Phebe Davidson, Peter Makuck, and Richard Simpson.

Ignore the over-sized, cursive drop caps that begin each piece (inelegantly in their aggressive elegance) and concentrate on the larger-than-life sized prose in this issue. When I think of "spiritual literature," I think first of poetry, and there certainly are some memorable poems here (most notably work by Rachel Hadas, Kathleen Graber, and ellen), but it's the prose that, surprisingly and delightfully, commands my attention above all. 

This Magazine is a delightfully eclectic little glossy out of Toronto that has been in publication since the 1960's. The magazine has recently seen some format changes, as it attempts, in the words of editor Patricia D’Souza, to define what it “means to be a magazine of alternative culture in a time when alternative culture has become a mainstream concept.” This will no longer run single-theme centered issues, choosing instead to “adop[t] a storytelling approach that is more responsive to current events.” 

Dubbed “The Transitional Issue,” this first issue of Toad Suck Review, based at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA), follows the demise of the Exquisite Corpse Annual, which ended when founder and editor Andrei Codrescu retired. The team at the helm aims to carry on the Corpse's “experimental sense of humor and international enquiries” while at the same time staying true to its central Arkansan roots. With gaping shoes to fill, the Toad Suck crew delivers an impressive first shot of literary whiskey.

The Tusculum Review is two hundred pages of a bit of everything – all wrapped up in a glossy purple cover. Ordinary? Not even close. “New voices” – that’s what the editors tell us it is about. It contains fresh, exciting material – like a one-act play with only one character living out a “wide awake nightmare,” titled “Gone” by Roy Sorrels. It’s ingenious, compact, and a delightful mini-nightmare to read.