The Best Literary Magazines You Should Actually Subscribe To

Literary magazines are where the best new writing appears before it becomes a book. They're also where established writers experiment and publish work that doesn't fit neatly into their public-facing catalogs. Subscribing to even two or three will expose you to voices that bestseller lists never surface.

The Paris Review is the most famous literary magazine in the world for a reason. Its interviews with writers, running since the 1950s, constitute the single best archive of craft wisdom available. Recent fiction and poetry selections maintain its reputation for publishing emerging voices alongside masters.

Buy a single back issue before you subscribe to anything. A copy of most of these runs £10 to £16. A year of The Paris Review is around $59 in the US and includes the full digital archive back to issue one in 1953, which is the actual value: every Writers at Work interview, from Hemingway onwards, searchable. That pays for itself in the first evening you spend inside it.

Granta publishes some of the best narrative nonfiction and fiction in the English language. Based in London, each themed issue explores a topic through the lens of international writers. The magazine's Best of Young Novelists lists have predicted literary stardom with uncanny accuracy.

Granta's Best of Young British Novelists list appears once a decade, which is what makes it worth arguing with. The first, in 1983, named Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan before most of them were famous. The 2023 list is the one to read now if you want a decent guess at which names become unavoidable by 2035.

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, founded by Dave Eggers, treats each issue as a design object. Issues have arrived as cigar boxes, mail art, and illuminated manuscripts. The experimental format matches the experimental content: fiction that pushes boundaries while remaining readable.

n+1 is the intellectual magazine for people who find most intellectual magazines insufferable. Based in Brooklyn, it publishes essays on culture, politics, and literature that are rigorous without being academic. The writing is sharp, opinionated, and willing to challenge its own readership.

The Believer combines long-form interviews, cultural criticism, and visual art into a magazine that feels genuinely different from everything else. Its interview format gives subjects room to develop complex ideas over thousands of words, producing some of the best cultural journalism being published.

The famous names are not the whole map. The Stinging Fly, published in Dublin three times a year, ran Sally Rooney's early short fiction and later had her guest-edit an issue. It costs around €12 and is consistently better than magazines with twenty times its budget. The Drift, A Public Space and Brick reward attention for the same reason: small enough to gamble on a writer nobody has heard of.

The common mistake is subscribing to five at once and reading none. Two is the number. A quarterly is 250-odd pages of dense work arriving four times a year, and any more than that simply stacks up unread, which is how people decide they do not like literary magazines when what they do not like is a backlog.

https://www.theparisreview.org/