Best of lists are by definition failures. They are subjective and, in most cases, arbitrary. But they can be useful for the conversations they create (often born from disagreement) and their recognition of quality; they bring attention to things. Though the media is awash with similar lists for albums, books, film, restaurants, and much else, I can’t recall ever seeing an annual one for the literary magazine—and 2011 was a great year for these magazine. What follows are seven literary magazine successes of 2011, in no particular order. Why seven? Lack of time, only. Many are missing from this list. Please add your comments; quality deserves recognition at the very least.

Triple Canopy 14: Counterfactuals

Without a doubt, Triple Canopy is one the most adept publishers at using the Internet as a unique medium with its own rules and possibilities (each issue brings with it an original online reading experience)—and TC also manages to be one of the best avant garde publications running in any medium. Issue 14, their “Counterfactuals” issue, is their self-proclaimed “first literary, or not not literary, issue,” and like most things put out by TC it is a mind bomb. The theme is summed up by Lucy Ives & Co. as “a sensibility both within and without form, genre, medium”—which includes diagram poems, performance pieces, semi-autobiographical surreal theater from Mina Loy, aphorisms from Sam Moyer, anthropology from Tan Lin, and more work way outside the box/screen.

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Smuggling Afghan heroin or women from Odessa would have been more reprehensible, but more logical. You know you’re a fool when what you’re doing makes even the post office seem efficient. Everything I was packing into this unwieldy, 1980s-vintage suitcase was available online. I don’t mean that when I arrived in Berlin I could have ordered more Levi’s 510s for next-day delivery. I mean, I was packing books.

Not just any books — these were all the same book, multiple copies. “Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy, Volume 1” is published, yes, by Triple Canopy, an online magazine featuring essays, fiction, poetry and all variety of audio/visual culture, dedicated — click “About” — “to slowing down the Internet.” With their book, the first in a planned series, the editors certainly succeeded. They were slowing me down too, just fine.

—from “My Berlin Airlift” by Joshua Cohen from The Sunday New York Times Book Review, January 15, 2012

The works presented in this issue either started out hardcopy or writers were asked to mail in a hardcopy form of a digitally accepted work; the piece, after arriving in the post, then became re-digitized in transfer to this particular here. Why go through all the bother? What interested us for this issue was the bother. How the tangible work becomes assimilated to a(n in)tangible era, showcased in 0s and ones, and the labour, increasingly more invisible, behind it. While some writers chose a literal embodiment for their poems—such as glass (Sargent), pen-in-hand (Booth), or another’s book (Reimer)—others leaned towards a more abstract representation, printing out their pieces directly from Word, letting the materiality show its face in a specific font (Seidner), a small ink smear at the top of each page (mclennan), one tracked change (Price).

—excerpt of editorial from issue 8 of Dear Sir,

I am a big fan of the Pushcart Prize anthologies; I own the first 1976 anthology, the 25th anniversary edition, and each one from the past six years. Pushcart editor Bill Henderson is something of a hero of mine, a feeling probably held by much of the literary publishing world; I use his book The Art of Literary Publishing every year in my publishing course. Luna Park interviews were once chosen by selecting the author of the first piece from that year’s Pushcart anthology—a tradition that ended the year I couldn’t get ahold of Katie Chase. When the Pushcart Prize began, it brought renewed attention to the literary magazine and small press world. The prize’s name is even credited to another publishing hero of mine, George Plimpton, for his Fifth Avenue Project Pushcart Protest in the 70s. Upon finally meeting Henderson at the 2008 AWP, my hands shook and I forgot to introduce myself. And two years ago when I had questions about a publishing project, I wrote Henderson a letter. I still have the charming reply he sent the following week.

Nonetheless, I was disappointed last month as I sat in the bleachers during my daughter’s swim meet and flipped through the 2012 Pushcart Prize edition. Was it just the chlorine making me uneasy? As usual the work in the anthology was generally good, sometimes fantastic. I read John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay “Mister Lytle” once again and lingered over each sentence of Lydia Davis’s short fictions. I stuck my tongue out at Anis Shivani. I read Katherine Graber’s poem “The Telephone” five or six times. READ MORE >

As a distant planet was destroyed by old age…
—Action Comics No. 1, 1938

He heaves the automobile into glowing sky, headlight popping off, bumper succumbing, windshield bursting, white rubber tire hurtling away. Machines beware of this force. The automobile is green. Bad guys shudder. The future runs faster than an express train.

The plant is mostly shuttered. If I could get any closer, I could say more about its inaction, but I’m lost on its periphery, above the valley that holds it. The bridge on the map is a road ending in a concrete barrier and chain-link fence. On the other side of the chain-link fence is a chain-link gate, open. Beyond the gate, the asphalt sprouts a Russian olive bush, bright weeds, a green beer bottle. The road crumbles off a cliff. Far below, a rail yard. At the brink, on the road’s surface, someone has spray-painted, in white, something that seems to read PUSH…

—from “Steel: Products of Cleveland” by Mary Quade from West Branch Fall/Winter 2011

Yesterday I received two copies of the first issue of OCCUPY!, an Occupy Wall Street inspired newspaper from the editors of n+1. More than many, perhaps, I tend to see literature in periodical form—by which I mean magazines, journals, newspapers, zines, etc—as an essential part of literary history and culture, in a tradition stretching back to the 17th century Nouvelles de la république des lettres or perhaps even the tipao of the Han Dynasty. This can often feel like a lonely position to hold, especially among my young creative writing students who, more often than not, see literary magazines as a large step down in interest and importance from the latest Stephen King novel. Perhaps rightly so? READ MORE >

Félix Vallotton painting of Félix Fénéon editing La Revue Blanche [The White Review]. 1896. Oil on cardboard. 52.5 cm. x 65 cm. Private collection.

I don’t remember having explained to anyone that the Little Review couldn’t pay for contributions. It was quite taken for granted that since there was no money there would be no talk of renumeration. No one ever asked me why I didn’t pay, no one ever made me feel that I was robbing the poor artist. It was nine years later in Paris that Gertrude Stein told me I couldn’t hope to do such a thing in Europe. Her tone was almost reproachful, although she had always offered her manuscripts to the Little Review with the same high disregard of payment that characterized all our contributors. She merely didn’t consider it good principle. Well, neither do I consider it good principle for the artist to remain unpaid—it’s a little better than for him to remain unprinted, that’s all. READ MORE >

Luna Park will be posting its first Best Lit Mags of the Year list next month. I am both nervous and anxious to finish the list—nervous for obvious reasons, and anxious because I don’t remember seeing such a thing before for lit mags. If such a list existed in 1978, the first issue of New England Review would certainly have been on it. And thanks to Pound & Joyce, a 1918 list couldn’t have ignored The Little Review v. 4 n. 11. Could a 1959 list have left off Big Table? Last year’s best of list never made it up on LP, but would likely have included this, this, and this. And this year? What were the best lit mags of 2011?

Granta publishes an animated graphic novel inspired by Roberto Bolaño’s short story from Granta 117: Horror, “The Colonel’s Son.” Here’s detail about the project from the Granta website:

In Roberto Bolaño’s ‘The Colonel’s Son’ – published in Granta’s Horror issue – the narrator recounts a B-grade horror flick he sees on late night TV. A girl gets bitten by a zombie; the boy he loves tries to save her; the father of the boy, in turn, tries to save him. Bloodshed spreads across the city, as one by one witnesses become victims . . . and then killers . . .

Nothingbutamovie.com is an HTML5-based animation inspired by Bolaño’s piece, and has been brought to life by Granta illustrator Owen Freeman and the innovative web designers at Jocabola, who collaborated on Arcade Fire’s The Wilderness Downtown. Click here to start spreading the contagion.