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 in the history of magazine Grand Street was, editor Ben Sonnenberg answered simply, “When we ran out of money.” This past March, Open City announced it is ceasing publication due to lack of funds. In his introduction to They’re At It Again: Stories from Twenty Years of Open City, an anthology published in June celebrating the magazine’s rich history, magazine co-founder Thomas Beller questions the ability for literary magazines to be both timely and timeless. Somehow Open City managed both, pushing literary boundaries and supporting writers like Sam Lipsyte, Lara Vapnyar, and Jonathan Ames, who called the magazine “the new Paris Review” for his generation. Though its magazine arm has folded, Open City Books will continue publishing.

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In my virtual travels over break, I was happy to see Madras Press get some press in David L. Ulin’s piece on unbound codex, print-on-demand, and e-books in his article on books vs. e-books in theLos Angeles Times. Madras distributes the proceeds of their individually bound short stories and novellas to charitable organizations of the author’s choosing.

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After landing Jim Shepard and Michael Cunningham for our debut, we thought we had it made. But shortly after the launch of Electric Literature No. 1, I found myself lying on the couch at 3 a.m., googling “how to deal with failure.” Despite all the work we had done to raise money, procure great stories, and master an impressive array of new publishing formats, our sales sucked. It felt as if the lacerating truth was about to come out: no one cares about literature.

Every little thing we did—landing a positive mention on the Washington Post Web site, releasing a video, publishing a new issue, holding a contest—would bump up our Web traffic and increase book sales. But within a few days, that bump would disappear. When we started, we thought we’d spend 80% of our time discovering great new writing and discussing literature. Instead, we learned that promotion is a publisher’s biggest challenge. By the end of our first month, we were spending 80% of our time on promotion.

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The LMC is just what it sounds like: a book club where the subject will be lit mags instead of novels and the like. Roxane was inspired by the great success of The Rumpus Book Club, which has recently read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Lan Samantha Chang’s All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. They also host great book club interviews with the writers of the books they are discussing (click the previous two links for examples). And it all happens online, so no one has to sit uncomfortably in a neighbor’s living room, and yet community is still born and reading is made—for a moment—public.

The LMC will discuss one magazine a month and host an interview with the editor of the magazine. The first magazine up is New York Tyrant 8, and discussion has already begun. Next up are future issues of The Collagist (free online) and Ploughshares (LMC members receive a discount).

Personally, there is no question I would be interested in such a thing, as Luna Park was begun for much the same reasons as LMC—because lit mags, like books, movies, and the like, are production points of great writing and art. It would seem to me that all readers and those interested in the direction of writing should consider getting on board.

For more information about LMC (”where to get your leather jacket and tattoo, etc,”) get in touch with Roxane. There is also a Google Group, if you want more info right away, or to keep up with things.

The book club seems a perfect fit for lit mags, as the magazines are already communities of reading/writing. Here is Novalis on this idea:

Journals are already books written with others. The art of writing with others is a strange symptom which foreshadows a great progress of literature. One day we will perhaps write, think, act collectively.

Here is Roxane:

I felt like, in reading the issue [New York Tyrant 8], I was having a conversation with the writers and with all the other people reading the magazine from the middle of a cornfield in rural Illinois. Over the next days and weeks, some of that conversation will take place here, through a series of guest posts about individual pieces in the issue or sentences from a poem, or the issue as a whole. We hope you will join in that conversation. There’s room for everyone.

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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 as an image. It is almost like a means of consummation. The reader ends up just continuously wanting to consume—more and more images, and not engage in serious reflections, interrogation, or imagination.

Also, the second installment by Greg Weiss on poetry and the literary magazine: “Conflict of Interest Part II: The Print Journals.”

At zine-scene, frequent LP contributor David Backer looks closely at Metazen:

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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, but certainly capable of more range. Writers could stretch. Most importantly, as a young writer I felt much more confident with an issue of Boulevard in my hand than one’s collected poems. I certainly needed to be familiar with both, but the possibility that my own work could one day appear in the thinner volume was exactly the confidence I needed to go write, to submit stories for workshop, and to pursue the study of writing.

Though I think Ripatrazone’s essay is necessary and intelligent, I recently discovered that the general argument for lit mags in the classroom isn’t all that new. Curt Johnson—editor of December: A Magazine of the Arts and Opinion from 1962 until his death in 2008—wrote on this same topic for the 1966 issue of College Composition and Communication.

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Gerald Howard’s recent essay on working class writers in the new Class in America issue of Tin House gets some attention from Will Wlizlo at Utne Reader, who writes that Howard’s piece is “thoroughly researched and deftly reasoned.

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