When Michael Chabon guest edited Issue 10 of Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern a decade ago, he wrote that he was conducting a unique experiment “in the hope that some kind of matter-antimatter explosion would occur.” Alongside stories by a cast of familiar literary names, Chabon folded in a selection of work by authors more commonly found in the adventure, science fiction, or thriller sections of the bookstore—an act of curatorial prowess that exemplified a burgeoning trend of literary magazines publishing genre writing in their pages…

Continue reading my latest Literary MagNet column in the July/August 2012 issue of Poets & Writers, featuring McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Phantom Drift, Fairy Tale Review, and Unstuck—magazines changing (warping, morphing) our literary sensibilities one explosive issue at a time.