Eight cool literary magazines

What do you think of literary magazines?

I set up a database to track literary journals, both online or print-only. By now it’s got over 350 entries. I find maybe 5 – 10% are really intriguing in some way. I’ll offer a handful of my favorites here and hope that you might add some of your own in the comments section.

DIAGRAM is “an electronic journal of text and art. As our name indicates, we’re interested in representations. In naming. In indicating. In schematics. In the labelling and taxonomy of things. In poems that masquerade as stories; in stories that disguise themselves as indices or obituaries.” This journal is endearingly odd and lo-tech. Literature is interleaved with maps, diagrams and bewilderment.

Muumuu House doesn’t seem to publish new work very often, but I like leafing through the 250 or so article listed in a heap on their front page. Nicolette Polek and Sam Pink are some of the writers I admire here; they give a sense of the journal’s fine-boned, imaginative, perplexing style.

Okay Donkey appears to publish one piece per week, alternating poetry (which often looks like flash fiction) with flash. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. The writers are good.

wigleaf, ah, wigleaf. Stories under 1000 words. They like a vast range of different styles of flash and they have helped to shape and expand the whole cosmos of flash. The magazine is wonderfully unpretentious and generous.

Bellevue Literary Review – yes, that Bellevue! Though it’s now an independent noprofit, it was born from NYC’s Bellevue Hospital (“the Chelsea Hotel of the mad”) and its focus remains creative writing on health, illness and healing. Mostly print-only but you’ll find a few selected pieces on their website.

Rattle does poetry. It’s more than just a magazine: it offers challenges, contests, a poem-of-the-day to your email in-box and no doubt much more. To be honest, I don’t read much poetry, but I admire the poems here; I find them often skillful, down-to-earth and surprising.

Heavy Traffic is very New York City, very stylish and very in your face.

Major 7th Magazine calls itself “Your Literary Mixtape.” Every piece refers (directly or, more often, oblquely) to some specific piece of music, which shows up as a Spotify link on the same page, in case you want to listen while reading. I discovered this journal recently and I have a crush on it.