It’s been some months since the last Digest post; here’s a recap of some spring & summer news: Literary magazines come and go at a rapid clip. For example: Charles McGrath once noted “the typical lifespan for a literary magazine appears to be roughly that of a major household appliance.” And when asked what the darkest moment

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Words without Borders is seeking to raise $7,000 to publish their first issue dedicated to Afghanistan. According to their Kickstarter page, they’ve already secured a story from Mohammad Hosain Mohammad’s collection Anjirha-ye Sorkh-e Mazar, which was awarded the prestigious Golshiri prize, as well as a story by Mohammad Asif Soltanzadah, and another by Pashto writer Sher

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Nick Ripatrazone—perhaps this country’s biggest promoter of lit mags in the classroom—asked readers “What is the best single issue of any literary magazine?” The responsewas astounding, with some fantastic suggestions: Conjunctions #29, McSweeney’s #32, Tin House #40, New York Tyrant #3, The Lumberyard #4, New American Review #1, TriQuarterly #56, Evergreen Review #1, Vertex #1,

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Happy New Year! I’m thrilled to be bringing you the new Luna Digest while Travis takes some much-needed time to spend with his family. So, if you have any news to share, feel free to pass it along. In my virtual travels over break, I was happy to see Madras Press get some press in David

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Electric Literature envisions a new (and “robust”) market for fiction: “Literature, Plugged In“. Here’s a low point from this manifesto of sorts from the EL editors, describing the origins and history of the publication; editors and publishers are really going to want to read the entire thing: After landing Jim Shepard and Michael Cunningham for

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I want to devote this entire post to potentially the most exciting thing to happen in lit mag reading since Bill Henderson launched The Pushcart Prize in 1976: The new Literary Magazine Club over at HTMLGIANT—hosted and created by Roxane Gay. The LMC is just what it sounds like: a book club where the subject

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This week at Luna Park, Maryanne Hannan interviews Cerise Press editor Fiona Sze-Lorrain: Sze-Lorrain: With online journals (or publications of any sort), the word risks presenting itself as an image, rather than a word, as Nadine Gordimer mentioned at the Guardian Hay Festival this year. You see the text on the screen. It presses back

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Nicholas Ripatrazone asks, “Is There a Lit Mag in This Class?” Here’s a bit from the middle: Writers did different things in literary magazines than they did in books. Books were stodgy, hard, spine-formed collections. There seemed little room to breathe within such pages. But literary magazines were athletic, a place for play—serious play, no doubt,

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My daughter has been telling me for some time how I should start a literary magazine for kids, or, at other times, that I should make a children’s section for Luna Park. I have told her many times that there are already magazines like Cricket and Stone Soup, and that, as far as Luna Park

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Writers at Luna Park examine the present and future of reading. In “Conflict of Interest?” Greg Weiss looks into the seeming discrepancy between the levels of readership and writership in contemporary poetry. And in “Benjamin Kunkel, Benadict Anderson, and the Fate of the Novel,” David Backer responds—in a roundabout, essayic sort of way—to Benjamin Kunkel’s

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