Named after novelist Frederick Barthelme, who edits, Rick Magazine is a new/old online literary magazine. It is new in that Rick Magazine never existed online, old in a couple ways—one stretching back to the beginnings of literary magazines on the internet.

The “first” online literary magazine was technically Swift Current in 1984. Begun by Frank Davey, Fred Wah, and David Godfrey, Swift Current was a literary database loaded onto a VAX 11-750 computer located at York University in Toronto and made accessible by subscription to personal users and institutions. More of a creative commons than an editor-run literary publication, Swift Current nonetheless served as a forerunner to the online literary magazine. READ MORE >

Interview with professor and novelist Timothy Schaffert, the new web editor of Prairie Schooner. Founded in 1926, Prairie Schooner is today a  literary quarterly published with the support of the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Nebraska Press. Current editor Hilda Raz recently won the 2010 Stanley W. Lindberg Award in Literary Editing.

Marcelle Heath: I’d like to start off by discussing the pleasures and pitfalls of online reading. What are your thoughts regarding reading habits and readership in general?

Timothy Schaffert: When I’m on the computer and I’m online, I’m generally doing fifty things at once. I start reading an article, I follow its links, I remember something I’ve been meaning to look up, so I look it up, then remember something else… in other words, I’m in a constant state of hitting pause, not to reflect, but to meander, to investigate something else. But literature calls for a full immersion; you want to turn yourself over to the author, and follow her lead. So though I do read fiction and poetry online—both new and old—the shorter it is, the more likely I’ll make it to the end of it without flitting away in search of information, or hyper-checking my email, or falling into the gaping maw of Facebook updates. But it’s while I’m online that I most often discover the work that I want to read offline. READ MORE >

There is a thrilling new story from Jim Shepard in the newest Zoetrope: All-Story. The story—”The Track of the Assassins“—is not unlike much of Shepard’s recent short fiction: slowly-revealed characters lodged in alluring moments in history. The setting of “Assassins” is the 20th century Iraqi and Irani deserts, where Freya Stark searches for Alamut, ancient home of the Hashshashin, the infamous Persian sect of assassins of the middle ages. (It is also the setting of a recent Disney blockbuster.) Shepard’s story begins:

My mother liked to remind me that at the age of four I left a garden party one rainy afternoon with my toothbrush in my fist, fully intending a life of exploration, only to be returned later that afternoon by the postman. Her version of the story emphasized the boundaries that her daughter refused to accept. Mine was about the emancipation I felt when I closed the gate latch behind me and left everyone in my wake, and the world came to meet me like a wave. READ MORE >

Armchair/Shotgun #2

New York City based literary magazine Armchair/Shotgun is looking for a new graphic & book designer:

Job Posting: Graphic and Book Designer

Armchair/Shotgun is seeking a graphic and book designer to assist in
the design, layout, and production of a Brooklyn-based literary
magazine which twice yearly publishes (on paper!) exemplary new
fiction, poetry, and visual arts. READ MORE >

We are looking for pieces to publish on a new series on The Future of the Literary Magazine. (We also have a current series going on Race, Class, Gender & Sexuality in Indie Publishing.)

We have asked some writers and editors to weigh in on the direction of lit mags and will also be republishing some stuff on the topic. The usual stuff: digital publishing, the graphic lit mag, literary journalism, financial obstacles, submissions, the environment, and so on.

There has been a lot of discussion recently on the future of the literary magazine. Such as

PEN America hosted editors of Granta, Tin House, and PEN and writers Rodrigo Fresán and Stamm in a conversation about “Literary Magazines: Here and Abroad, Now and in the Future” (video)

Ted Genoways of VQR launched a ribald discussion of lit mags & fiction in his Mother Jones article “The Death of Fiction,” which continued over at the VQR blog

Following that, Carolyn Kellogg wondered at the LA Times “What is the future of printed literary journals?”

Fictionaut founder Jurgen Fauth posited his vision of lit mags future at Huffington Post with “Transcend and Include: Fictionaut and the Future of the Literary Magazine”

Joshua Harmon pondered “on the future of higher-ed-subsidized literary magazines”

I talked with editors of Opium, Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, and Antioch Review about the subject in a panel during the 2010 AWP Conference “The Future of the Literary Magazine”

Roxane Gay of PANK has been writing about this subject almost constantly at HTMLGIANT

And Jim Hanas recently blogged about individual publishing overthrowing lit mags, “Nobody Likes the Slush Pile. Let’s Get Rid of It.“

We want to continue this. Essays, fiction, interviews, poems, drawings, etc. Submit via our submissions manager or query lunaparkreview <at> gmail.com.

Yeow Kai Chai

One of Singapore’s most admired and respected poets, Yeow Kai Chai has two poetry collections, Pretend I’m Not Here (2006) and Secret Manta (2001), which was adapted from an entry shortlisted for the 1995 Singapore Literature Prize. In 2009, he edited the anthology Reflecting on the Merlion with Edwin Thumboo, with his own poems included in the anthologies No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry and Love Gathers All: The Singapore-Filipino Anthology of Love Poetry. A journalist and music critic, he is also a co-editor of the independent online journal Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS). Known for wearing different caps as a writer, he has worked in the Singapore media industry for more than a decade, including as deputy editor of Life!, the lifestyle and entertainment section of The Straits Times; and currently as the English editor of My Paper, Singapore’s first bilingual free paper. Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé casts seven pointed questions in his general direction, as Kai Chai lets fly his thoughts on his second collection.

(*Desmond Kon created the PROMOSAIC/PO-ERM interview for authors whose work has made him pause on seven separate occasions, hard and heavy enough for him to put together seven pressing questions, ranging from the very specific to very broad, and always ending with the film question.)

Read five of Kai Chai’s poems here:

Couplets

Quarterly Report No. 6: Ethnological Warfare Atrocity Exhibition

Quarterly Report No. 7: Epiphytes And Vetiver Control

From A To Z, An Action-packed Zoetrope Via Taste, Fruit, Bodily Organs And Synthetic Organisms

My Flooey Love

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé: I love how, in the cover and title pages alone, I’m confronted with a sort of Foucauldian facelessness of the disappearing author, evanescent and dropping south, out of sight. The playful use of “pretend I’m yeow kai chai” moving into “pretend I’m     here”, moving into the bolded “not by yeow kai chai.” I’m too tempted to read “death of the author” into this collection, what with the twelve “Memento Mori” installments propping it. Could you tell me how you cut and shuffled identity, and more of the “death” deck?

Yeow Kai Chai: The collection began to take shape with ‘Memento Mori,’ the first of 12 installments, which I wrote after my maternal grandmother died in 2003. It was the first death in the family that truly affected me and made me rethink life.

Memento mori, which means “Remember you shall die” in Latin, refers to a range of paintings, statues, photographs, and architectural details that serve as reminders of our mortality. The poems are a continual process of grieving and reflection as I try to comprehend death, and by extension what we are when we are alive.

The evanescence of our identities feeds into this idea. You make up your identities throughout your life. Identity is not static, being inevitably tied to role-play and context. We hide and expose certain aspects of ourselves at any one time. When we meet colleagues at work or chat online, we adopt versions of ourselves, despite our best intentions. READ MORE >

here you are faceless bobs
like flotsam in the strait narrow

sea scented with iridescent oil
radiating in rainbow swirl

as fin glistens before tell-tale lollipops
are sucked into the cistern READ MORE >

But for the present, it’s beyond my control. When it finally happens after yet another 20 minutes, the helplessness underscores the inexorable reel of martyrdom, twirling madly in and out of love, as if the whole universe will now be birthed into another plastic bag, clean as disinfectant.  We – all of us sworn witnesses, heart on sleeve – remember everything in a pinhole’s entirety, only that nobody can recall a nation’s shame quite the same way. Deceptive blue sky, those green, green fields, then grey unforgiving rain, these clichés set up the perfect grime. Then what? After all the ready pool of iconography dries up once we need a dip. But the interrogator soldiers on. Ferns and creepers cling to the shlubby ordinariness of it READ MORE >