First issue of The Chicagoan by artist Boris Riedel, from The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age, published by the University of Chicago Press

Now that the presidential race is over, on to a backlog of lit mag news & notes (and LP4). Frederick Barthelme—a Luna Park advisory editor whose new novel, Waveland, comes out in April 2009—is interviewed by Gary Percesepe in the new issue of /nor. (Percesepe contributed two pieces for the premiere issue of Luna Park, here and here.) Just days before the election (and only weeks after releasing their third issue) Five Dials put out issue four, a special election issue with writing by Chomsky, Kunzru, and more. The New Yorker blog Book Bench writes on the first and second parts of A Public Space & BAM’s “Life is a Pitch” reading and film series—and also on the 1926-35 New Yorker look-alike, The Chicagoan. One mag interviews another, as translation journal Calque interviews Habitus: A Diaspora Journal. University of Rochester’s international Three Percent reviews the Estonian Literary Magazine 27. Mindy Farabee wonders in the LA Times about just what kind of thing The Thing is—literary magazine published as baseball cap, doorstop, etc. Two of the only two literary magazines published with soundtracks, the Canadian Carousel and Tod Lippy’s Esopus both release new issues. (Carousel’s soundtrack—er, “Mixtape”—is available online free.) It was bound to happen: an oral history of George Plimpton, George, Being George. And current reflections on lit mags past: Paul Marion on Alentour (1935-43) in The Massachusetts Review, and Toni Mariani writes in Documenta on the revolutionary Moroccan literary magazine Souffles (1966-71).