With newspapers folding and cutting corners all around the country, it’s easy to give up entirely on the fourth estate. But now look who’s riding in on their white horse: those writers you newspaper types wouldn’t give jobs to before because they tried to make their articles all “literary.” Take that, 5 W’s.
As Dave Eggers said in his interview here at The Rumpus, McSweeney’s will soon be releasing a newspaper edition, with writers from Stephen King to Miranda July to Junot Diaz helping to create Panorama, which they are billing as a “prototype.” (A preview is here).
But it’s not just at McSweeney’s. Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy points us in the direction of a powerful four part piece at the Virginia Quarterly Review on the Mumbai attacks of November 26-28, 2008. She says, “That a magazine like VQR — esteemed, yet with a modest and distinctly literary circulation — has undertaken such an effort demonstrates an enthusiasm for significant nonfiction storytelling.”
In other news, The Boston Review has this online report on “The Trial of Ezra Nawi,” and Guernica has this piece on Sudan (as well as lots more). I haven’t been around long enough to say whether all this is new or not (I doubt that it is), but there’s definitely more now than there was a few years ago when I started reading literary journals again (there was a long, dark chapter in there where I completely sucked).
And the question, I think, is whether this will expand the reach of literary journals and increase the quality of news coverage, or whether all it means is that we’ll end up with a few literary types that are a lot better informed on the issues of the day than they were a few years before.
4 responses
Good insight, Sean. I look forward to this trend getting more popular: have always loved articles from The Nation, like this one (http://bit.ly/58Zbvj) by Laila Lalami on speaking with a French writer and his views on Moroccan Immigrants– the detailed narrative, a comprehensively told story and editors who aren’t stingy with page-space make for good reading. Have noticed that the NYT has started trying this approach as well, e.g. this report today on Obama’s surge decision (http://bit.ly/4C4VTB), and Charles Duhigg’s series, ‘Toxic Water'(http://projects.nytimes.com/toxic-waters).
This makes sense with the increase in popularity of true narratives, memoir, etc. Non-fiction literary writing is selling well. This is disappointing, somewhat, for those of us who still naively dream of selling our fiction, but its the way it is.
I’m also torn. As a writer who has great interest in current topics and spends as much time reading strategy blogs as literary blogs, I can’t complain about this too much. In addition to fiction I very much enjoy writing about current topics, but abhor the awful standards to which traditional journalism has fallen.
In the end, this may be good for us all – If it allows more writers to write things they’re interested in, and if it draws in more readers to “literary journals”, and exposes them to more literary writing, we’ll all benefit.
Seth: On David Shulman’s Ezra Nawi piece in Boston Review: always happy to have someone take notice of what we are doing, but……as a cursory glance at our website (or print edition) indicates, we are not a literary magazine that has recently started dipping its oar into political waters. I have been Boston Review editor since 1991 (co-editor since 2002), and we have been fully online since 1996. Throughout that time, the front of the magazine has been political. We also are a leading publisher of poetry (and poetry reviews) and of fiction (Junot Diaz is the fiction editor). But we are not part of the trend that you identify (good trend, just not us).
Joshua Cohen
Hi Joshua, Fair enough, and if that is how it reads, then that is my mistake! I didn’t mean to insinuate that the Boston Review (or the Virginia Quarterly Review or Guernica, for that matter) is new to political writing. I have been reading The Boston Review, believe it or not, for years and years and years. I simply meant to cite it is an excellent example of a source that has recently published excellent political writing that could be considered “literary” in nature. But you are correct. That has been a constant at the Boston Review for years, and it is not a new thing. I could have chosen a better example.
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