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.” Continue reading “The Threepenny Review – Spring 2012”

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. Continue reading “The Threepenny Review – Winter 2010”

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. Continue reading “The Threepenny Review – Winter 2007”

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. Continue reading “The Threepenny Review – Winter 2006”

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. Continue reading “The Threepenny Review – Spring 2004”

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.  Continue reading “The Threepenny Review – Winter 2004”

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. Continue reading “The Threepenny Review – Summer 2003”