Small page-turners

All through the year, the Little Magazines arrive. These are the literary reviews, most of them published in, and sometimes with, funding from colleges. The public knows nothing about them, and you don't usually see them in bookstores. But they are loaded with short fiction, poetry, and sometimes photography, and are often the medium in which the work of the best and most successful fiction writers first appears. Most of them belong to the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. A good online index is found here. Some of the best around the country are Ontario Review (actually published at Princeton), Paris Review, Antioch, Hanging Loose, Kenyon Review, Gettysburg Review, to name a few.

No matter how many one might mention, some will be missed. So, with apologies to the overlooked, Massachusetts-based literary magazines include Ploughshares (the winter issue just arrived, edited by Rosanna Warren), WHLReview, Button, Boston Review (not to be confused with:), Boston Book Review, Worcester Review, South Boston Literary Gazette, AGNI Review, Massachusetts Review, and Fulcrum. Let attention be paid.