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Luna Digest, 7/28

picture6Did discussion of The Paris Review un-acceptance business get a bit too feverish last week on the internet? Perhaps. Daniel Nester—who brought the story to light—has a run-down of much of the online conversation, as well as a new email from Paris Review editor Lorin Stein (not to Nester) apologizing for the handling of the situation and promising to give the poets, along with a personal apology, “the full fee that we owe them.” Sounds like the perfect solution.

No doubt the best thing to come of the event was Blake Butler’s pitch-perfect parody over at HTMLGIANT:

Latest in the controversy regarding manuscripts recently turned down post-acceptance at the Paris Review, apparently we may get to see the maligned documents see daylight after all. According to insiders at the Peemsmen Monthly, a second-shift janitor at the P.R. headquarters, upon realizing what literary-scandal-wrongdoing-travesty he’d been made to take part in, ran back out into the trashyard where the massive P.R. dumpster is and fished out said to-be-and-no-longer-ParisReviewianed language.

The janitor, who wishes to remain anonymous for now, is currently looking to publish the lot as a “found manuscript.” He is available for contact via representation by Marble-Withersby Agency in New York.

Currently tallied among the rubble:

– A haiku by Jonathan Franzen on the brevity of life and the deliciousness of fat free yogurt

– An erasure by Nam Le of his mother’s travel diaries as a child, concerning her impregnation with him, which Nam Le erased himself from entirely, a retroactive comment on the Gulf War…

And the list goes on.

Though it’s true they still don’t accept electronic submissions, Prairie Schooner recently tapped Timothy Schaffert to be their first web editor. Marcelle Heath interviewed Schaffert about online reading and new directions for the magazine.

MiPOesias is using MagCloud to publish their chapbook series, where you can read such books as Sam Rasnake’s Lessons in Morphology. (And if you have an iPad, you can read it for free.)

4x6_issue2_promo-200x300Looking for design work? Brooklyn-based lit mag Armchair/Shotgun is looking for a new graphic/book designer for forthcoming issues.

Finally, we have a new series at Luna Park on The Future of the Literary Magazine (and a list of links on the topic). Does it have a future? What (or whom) does it look like? What will its relation to writer/reader be? And so on. We are looking for interviews, articles, excerpts, reprints, and etcetera on the direction of the medium.

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.


  1. 1 Purge announcements and updates: Extras. « We Who Are About To Die

    […] Travis Kurkowski thinks the whole thing got out of hand and loves Blake Butler’s “pitch-perfect” parody. […]



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