Cover of online lit mag issue of MR, guest edited by Gary Percesepe and Travis Kurowski, editor of Luna Park

Mississippi Review online has just put up its latest issue: “The Literary Magazine at 100.” The issue title is in reference to the 100th birthday of the contemporary literary magazine (meaning the literary magazine as we recognize the form today), placing its contemporary beginning at Ford Madox Ford’s The English Review launch in 1908. (For further information on this, see Steve Evans’s essay “The Little Magazine a Hundred Years On.”) More than just a celebration of the form, the issue functions as an investigation into and commentary on the literary magazine of past and present.

The online issue of MR functions as a teaser for the upcoming fall 2008 print issue of the magazine, which will contain everything from the online issue, along with a variety of other pieces–such as new fiction from John Brandon and Rene Houtrides, an interview with the editor of Antioch Review, a roundtable discussion between editors of some of the nation’s best literary magazines, an oral history of the literary magazine (in the tradition of Plimpton), and, of course, much more.