I don't know how this will go, but we'll see. What literary magazines do you all enjoy? My favorite is Alaska Quarterly Review. When I used to piece through short story collections, the stories I would like had an uncanny habit of being from AQR. So I'm a subscriber now. Slightly experimental without being indulgent and/or foolish. A value placed on originality, at least in its best stories.
I read the Oxford Magazine, from Ole Miss. I started reading it when they were serializing John Grisham's "Painted House" and got hooked.
When I am at the library, I read the Sun out of Chapel Hill, NC. I have yet to see it in any bookstores though.
We used to sell it at the St. Peter Food Co-op, in St. Peter, Minnesota. I used to see copies of it in Odegaard's in St. Paul, but I believe that place is in bookstore heaven, now. Odd magazine, The Sun. In the good way. I mean, it's not predictable, you can say that for it. I like Paris Review for interviews, New York Quarterly and OnTheBus for poetry, North American Review for fiction, and Review of Contemporary Fiction for book reviews.
Yeah, someone help me out here with some good recommendations. For being someone who's writing stories (not writing enough though, and thus not really publishing all that much right now) I'm woefully out of touch with literary magazines....(as well as contemporary literature on the whole, but that's another, sad story)
Andrei Codrescu, editor of exquisitecorpse, is also a regular commentator on NPR, and he's extremely witty.
I was at LSU when Codrescu started teaching there. He used to be pretty crappy in the classroom, but you could learn an awful lot elsewhere hanging out with him, and he was very accessible. I've had a few things in the paper Corpse, and in two of their three anthologies. (The Stiffest of the Corpse, and Thus Spake the Corpse)Though I had a tough time with the mag for awhile because I made a smart-ass comment that Andrei was in danger of becoming the Yakov Smirnoff of American poetry... which wouldn't have been much of a problem, 'cept his mistress and co-editor (whom I knew by name, but not by her newfound status) was standing there. My two favorite features of the Old corpse: their copyright line: "Exquisite Corpse forbids duplication but authorizes memorization," and a late addition, the Body Bag, where they would rank their rejections, mocking the worst of them by name.
Good friend of mine did his MFA at LSU in screenwriting, and actually got Codrescu to do the voice over on a film he directed. He also described Codrescu as a prime "hanger outer."
That's definitely his primary strength as a teacher, though I've been told he's been getting much better in front of the class. In fact, in a workshop once (non-fiction prose, IIRC) he said something that I've never forgotten. A student (not me, thank God) wrote a 10 page self-indulgent piece of crap that was basically meditation on the word "I" (with puns on "eye" and all sorts of predictable garbage like that). After putting us through his efforts, the student finished and looked up at Andrei. Codrescu shook his head as if waking himself up and said (if you know his accent, you'll really dig this), "there is a name for that genre of writing. It is called 'whacking off.'" The kid was pissed, but to his credit, he kept showing up and actually got better as the semester went on. So Andrei can do what he's paid for.
I have almost every McSweeney's. Some of the stuff is highly unreadable. But I'm such a graphic design junkie, I can't help but buy them. The recent thrilling stories edition was diverting. I used to buy "Story" way back when and it had some exellent work in it. I'm not sure if it's still around.