Literary magazines are born to die. Radical passion often meets practical reality. Sometimes the fire behind great literary magazines is the exact thing that causes them to burn out. Other magazines lose institutional funding, fold because of scandal, or vanish along with their masthead. Whatever the reason, the literary world is full of defunct magazines you shouldn’t forget about. Here are five that are worth remembering.
The phrase “to have your cake and eat it”, much used in relation to Brexit, is a bit odd. In its current form it is not the paradox it purports to be, since having and then eating a cake is the usual sequence; in its original form (“eat your cake and have it too”), it has more force. As a metaphor for Brexit, it was always a bit of a joke.
Of the important global crops, the banana is the most genetically uniform. A single cluster of nearly identical genotypes, the Cavendish subgroup, nearly monopolizes the world’s banana groves and banana trade. In contrast to the riotous rainbow of genetic diversity that lends sustainability to natural plant and animal populations, the world’s banana industry has the stability of an upside-down Egyptian pyramid balanced on its tip.
That fact leads to another superlative: The commercial banana is the world’s most endangered major crop. The future of the intercontinentally traded banana was once, and is again, precarious. Given that their wild progenitors are as variable as most species, how has it come to pass that most of the banana plants growing in the world have become so uniform? And what does that uniformity mean for their future as the “world’s most perfect food”?
Writing is a liminal act, one that comes from a place between the writer and the world, the writer and the page. In this way it is mediated by death, desire, and dreams, those other “in between” spaces we move in and out of in this life. These are the spaces that Jenny Boully delicately traces in her collection of lyric essays on the writing life, Betwixt-and-Between—the title itself taken from JM Barrie, whose forever boy-child Peter Pan was torn between fantasy and the real world. It is Peter’s “hesitations, refusals, yearnings, oscillating and uncertain desires” that Boully finds compelling, and to which she compares her craft and career. As a lyric essayist whose work engages with the fluid movement between genre, desire, and the act of writing, she, too, is caught between worlds.