Luna Digest, 9/15

Descant offers a preview of their newest issue “Immanence/Transcendence.” Poetry offers up their entire September 2009 issue, with writing by, among others, Reading Comics author Douglas Wolk. And Brevity‘s Fall 2009 issue includes a—well, depressing, but insightful short piece from Sherman Alexie, “Somebody Else’s Genocide.”

Raritan founding editor—and a founding editor of the Library of America—Richard Poirier has died.

Electric Literature‘s already been mentioned a few times on this blog and on the Luna Park site, but they’ve now begun a YouTube page with a Single Sentence Animation series, where artists put lines from short stories by Lydia Millet and Rick Moody to colorful video. Seems only a matter of time before other lit mags add such interesting videography to their productions.

Up on your Bengali literature? Kabitirtha, “one of the leading Bengali literary magazines today,” puts their September 2009 issue online. (It’s in Bengali, of course.)

Dark Sky Magazine interviews Night Train founding editor Rusty Barnes:

Social networking—I came to it a little late, sadly—gives us really incredible traffic. We double and sometimes triple our normal traffic just through short announcements on Goodreads and Facebook and Myspace. If I had enough patience to Twitter, that would help too, but besides being impatient, I’m embarrassed to use a service with such a stupid fucking name. There’s no dignified way to say you Twitter, so I simply ignore the whole phenomenon.

Talented Opium Magazine designer David Barringer has put a bunch of his work from the magazine online at Issuu. Barringer has offered up some entire back issues of the magazine. And, on a side note, while there I ran across more complete issues from Keyhole and Caketrain and Geist. A wonderful resource, no doubt.

Jonathan Lethem guest edits an issue of The Thing—which consists entirely of a pair of black glasses (pictured at right). A word from the editors:

Jonathan’s issue is entitled the “Chaldron Optical System.” It relates to his upcoming novel CHRONIC CITY and consists of a glasses case, a pair of clear glasses with text on each of the arms, and a care and maintenance manual written in both English and French.

The Literary Type explores the significance of Canada’s literary magazines in the series “A Mighty Small Mag.”

Also from Literary Type, Arc Poetry Magazine asks readers to help edit their magazine—or at least to help judge their poetry contest.

And Luna Park Review is finally back up and running. Check back for essays about, interviews with, and excerpts from literary magazines around the globe.

Every Tuesday, Travis Kurowski presents Luna Digest, a selection of news from the world of literary magazines. Travis is the editor of Luna Park, a magazine founded on the idea that journals are as deserving of critical attention as other artistic works.