Why Literary Magazines Matter

Lorin Stein, of the Paris Review, discusses the reasons they do for Johns Hopkins Magazine.

From the piece...

At the same time, digital literary magazines, journals, and blogs didn’t just pick up the book reviewing and author interviewing slack created by conventional media. These sites became culture portals and online communities, whether litblogs (Jessa Crispin’s Bookslut, author/essayist Maud Newton’s personal website), literature magazines (Giancarlo DiTrapano’s New York Tyrant, the Los Angeles Review of Books), or literary journals (Action Yes, Electric Literature, jubilat).

Today’s Paris Review stands at the corner of ye olde newsstand and the e-reader. “There was a time when the main job of a little magazine was to put stuff out there that we wouldn’t have found otherwise,” Stein says. “Now that is not at all the job anymore. Now, it’s recreating the experience of walking into a good bookstore or a good music shop or talking to someone whose tastes interest you. Without that, there’s no point in having a little magazine anymore.”

In the editor’s note to the first issue he assembled, Stein praised the founders’ efforts to find and publish “things they actually loved” and observed that even then this strategy was a “distinctly retro” throwback to the little magazines of the 1910s and 1920s.