Some Gritty Literature for Black Friday

I know and appreciate the Black Friday tradition of looking for bargains and stretching the dollar to initiate a more disciplined holiday practice, but I want to make a suggestion for anyone looking for something a bit less basic (sensu this) might check out a subscription to a little magazine.

This past week, I did some traveling with volume 114 of the Greensboro Review. I really enjoyed the short fiction which featured stolen submarines, relationship wracked by climate change and Hawaiian crickets. The stories in the volume reveal the fertile ground at the intersection of dirty realism and climate fiction and embody the notion that in the 21st century, the poor will experience the future first. 

The Greensboro Review is one of five little magazines that I get each year and each of them offers something distinct and 

Conjunctions 80, for example, shares the Greensboro Review 114 interest in water and Conjunctions 81 explores the numinous and Conjunctions 82 is titled “Works and Days.”

Ploughshares is another regular read and the Fall 2023 issue’s emphasis on long-form prose made it an easy companion on flights and lazy Sunday afternoons. The essay by Anthony David was brilliant. The Ploughshares’ blog opens up new critical perspectives and has enriched my reading list. Check out a recent post title “Fiction of the Shopping Mall.“

It’s taken me a bit longer to warm to Prairie Schooner. I know its history and its central place in the development of “Midwestern Modernism,” but living on the Northern Plains initially washed off any of the exoticism that this distinctive regionalism offered. Over time, however, I’ve warmed to it and found more and more to appreciate in its pages. Ángel García’s portfolio on history in the most recent issue (96.4, I believe) is worth a read.

My longest standing subscription is to N+1. It feels like the most ambitious of the little magazines that I read regularly and its online presence is certainly the most robust and perhaps even the most compelling. I love their take on social issues from the little book What Was the Hipster? (for which they brilliantly published the index online) to their recent issue on Aggression. The essay “Not One Tree” interrogates the intersection between carceral state, the environment, and poverty in a way not radically different from some of the stories in the Greensboro Review.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to North Dakota Quarterly which readers of this blog know well enough that I don’t need to introduce it here.

It’s Black Friday and I get that many of you are probably not in the mood to curl up with a little magazine by the fire, but just maybe you’re looking for something to buy for that one uncle or cousin or sister who is always hard to by for. Maybe check out a subscription to a little magazine as a gift!