Time-stamps:
0:00 Pre-event
12:03 Program
59:13 Q&A
Join us for a conversation about the past, present, and future of the little magazine with Matthew Shen Goodman of The Baffler, Mark Krotov of n+1, and Sarah Leonard of Lux, hosted by Jess Bergman (C’14) of The Baffler. What makes a magazine little? In their influential 1947 study The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich defined the little magazine as “a magazine designed to print artistic work which for reasons of commercial expediency is not acceptable to the money-minded periodicals or presses.” Despite their inherent marginality - the “little” in little magazine refers to the size of its imagined audience, not to its staff or budget, though they tend to be small too - these periodicals have remained a more or less unbroken literary tradition since the turn of the 20th century, from Poetry to The Partisan Review to Callaloo, Bitch, and emerging outlets like Parapraxis. Even as many individual magazines have folded, facing difficult financial or cultural headwinds in a contracting media industry, the movement has been rejuvenated again and again by a new generation of writers and editors who, in the words of Offman, Allen, and Ulrich, are “stimulated by some form of discontent” with the status quo.
Jess Bergman is a senior editor at The Baffler and a contributing writer at Jewish Currents. She worked at the Kelly Writers House from 2010 to 2014.
Matthew Shen Goodman is a writer and editor in New York whose work has appeared in The Paris Review, n+1 and other outlets. He is the editor-in-chief of The Baffler, and a contributing editor at Triple Canopy. He is working on two forthcoming books: Lording, a novel about social workers, and American Accomplice, a nonfiction book about Asian American conservatives (both Astra House).
Mark Krotov is the coeditor and publisher of n+1.
Sarah Leonard is the editor-in-chief of Lux and a member of the Dissent editorial board.