Luna Digest, 1/12

This week, Luna Park will be posting a day-by-day reading of McSweeney’s recent newspaper-styled issue 33, The San Francisco Panorama. Our copy just arrived in the mail a week ago, so we are, honestly, getting a bit of a late start here, but hoping to make that up with duration of coverage. The following is from the first post:

Part 1: Opening the Package

The Panorama showed up in the mail last week in a white plastic envelope, inside of which was the newspaper issue itself, tucked again inside a super-sized ziploc bag. It took a minute to get the thing out of the layers of packaging. Maybe it was because it arrived so soon after Christmas, but the opening up of The Panorama’s package felt more like opening a gift than it felt like opening the mail—even Luna Park mai, which is mostly made up of magazines like McSweeney’s. The wrapping itself wasn’t Christmasy—it was fairly bland, actually—but the thing inside was big, colorful, and awkward. (After looking at the unwrapped newspaper, my nine-year old daughter said, “Is that just one paper, or many?” Just one, I said. “That’s a really big paper,” she said, stepping back.)….

And here’s Roxane Gay getting the jump on Luna Park in a nice in-depth piece about her reading experience of The Panorama for HTMLGIANT: “Inside Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory: McSweeney’s 33—Panorama.”

CLMP—the organization of indie lit publishing—sent out an email this morning about Poetry Ark, an organization that has

launched a one-year, online competition to select 100 outstanding English-language poems by living authors. After an initial screening by our editors, all other decisions will be based on the votes of you, our site visitors. Poems that make it to the final selection of 100 will be included in an anthology of winners and will automatically qualify for an additional round of voting to determine the recipients of prizes totaling over $2,000.

According to those at CLMP, it all seems to be on the up-and-up over at Poetry Ark, and I must say that the website has a nice look to it. I suppose everyone is going to have to judge for themselves then about this strange commingling of American Idol and literary publishing.

Here’s some humorous literary appropriation from the Significant Objects‘ Twitter feed: “Lessons from Significant Objects for…law firm branding?” Even reading it again now—twice—I have trouble quite getting the logical leap the writer makes from (A) fictional stories attached to random objects for sale on ebay to (B) greater transparency at X law firm means we can continue charging premium prices without feeling bad about it.

According to Collagist editor Matt Bell, “Caketrain 7 is one of the best recent lit mag issues.” High praise—but after looking at the preview of the recent issue up on Caketrain‘s website, I’m very, very intrigued to read the rest. Here’s from Emily Carr’s issue-opening poem “13 ways of happily, draft 7,” which begins alluringly, “scorned as timber, beloved of the sky / you emerge from the photobooth / with yourself in triplicate ferrying corn…”

Some literary magazines that deserve much more of your attention: Australia’s Torpedo (via Lost at E Minor), a new issue of Kyoto Journal, Butler University’s Booth, musical and literary At Length, Lauren Becker‘s new Corium Magazine, and, also new, /One/.

Finally, Push Pin design studios’ Seymour Chwast’s limited distribution magazine The Nose isn’t exactly a literary magazine, but the website for the recent “Prediction” issue is one of the best “current issue” magazine website pages I’ve ever seen. It takes time, but is well worth the wait. The issue is full of unrealized century-old predictions, such as, “There will be no C, X or Q in our everyday alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary.”

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.