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lvdb2From the second part of our Luna Park interview with Laura van den Berg—the part of the interview about lit mags (see the first of the interview part here):

LP: If you had an unlimited budget to make your dream magazine with, what would it look like?

Van den Berg: I would want to make it more like a book or a chapbook rather than a journal. I love the idea of issues that highlight a single work, too, a la One Story. Maybe a really fancy chapbook, some kind of One Story/McSweeney’s hybrid.

LP: Are you working on anything now you wouldn’t mind talking about? Are there monsters involved? (I hope so.)

Van den Berg: I’m working on a novel and there is monster, although it’s somewhat removed from the narrator, appearing as something she keeps seeing on TV. I was determined to do something monster-less after finishing What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, for fear of repeating myself too much, but I don’t seem to be able to help myself.

9780805090802Who says the editing life isn’t dramatic? (Maybe no one ever said it.) Two novels out this year with protagonist lit mag editors: Sam Savage’s The Cry of the Sloth and Paul Auster’s Invisible.

Significant Objects teams up with SMITH Magazine: Six Words of Significance (or something like that).

It has been a long time, but poetry mag 1913: A Journal of Forms is finally back with issue 3.

Blake Butler’s new polemic on lit mags, this time on reasons for being interesting. For example:

There are certainly journals that challenge and delight with a great % of work they include. But more often, it feels like, many journals are just a junior version of the bigger dogs. Less funded, more controlled, but still interested in pushing forward the same values as the ones they claim to be proud to be separate from. And so, when someone comes to this ‘market’ in the idea that they are escaping the above, and finds more of it, with worse design, what does that feel like? Where is the exit? What kind of ship?

New Gigantic mag mini-monster issue with, well, monster contents. Such as: “Brian Evenson on the Imperatives of the Modern Horror Film by Adrian Van Young.”

The Iowa Review gets a makeover.

I missed this originally: Shya Scanlon—author of the novel Forecast currently being serialized in 42 online lit mags—has some interesting things to say on The Faster Times about the future of web werialization. And he has even more to say in part II of the same piece, such as:

If writers are shedding conventions in this way, could it only be a matter of time before they start serializing their efforts? Or, to put it another way, might the results of their new forms lend themselves well to serialization?

The publisher’s nephew, hip-quirky Wes Anderson film star Jason Schwartzman, will be designing the next issue of Zoetrope: All-Story, with new fiction from Elizabeth McCracken, Stuart Dybek, and others. Here’s a review of the mag’s last issue (designed by Rex Ray) from the similarly wealthy magazine Dossier.

stewartcoverNew magic from inside The Cupboard: “The Cupboard is pleased to announce A Brief Encyclopedia of Modern Magic by Michael Stewart which will immediately become the most important compendium of magical knowledge you own.” Well, awesome.

In case you somehow missed it, Electric Literature in NYTimes (and I promise to stop writing about them—that is, unless they keep doing such great stuff):

The brains behind Electric Literature are Andy Hunter, 38, and Scott Lindenbaum, 26, writers who met in 2006 at Brooklyn College’s M.F.A. program in fiction writing. From an office of roughly 300 square feet in an industrial building between the Dumbo and Fort Greene neighborhoods, they added an iPhone application in July, a month after their first issue.

Every Tuesday, Travis Kurowski presents Luna Digesta selection of news from the world of literary magazines. Travis is the editor of Luna Park, a magazine founded on the idea that journals are as deserving of critical attention as other artistic works.

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