Luna Digest, 1/26

This week Luna Park continues our series on race, class, gender and sexuality in indie publishing with an article on publishing and the body by Sherisse Alvarez, which begins:

As a writer, I have thought a lot about “community” and what it means.  I am often hyper-aware of my identities as I write: female, gay, Cuban-American, daughter of exiles.

One of the most anticipated books of 2010 was Joshua Ferris’s new novel The Unnamed, out from Reagan Arthur Books earlier this month. In case you aren’t ready to go buy a 320-page novel about a compulsive walker, Granta has published a long excerpt of the book in their just-released Work issue: “The internists made referrals. The specialists ordered scans. The clinics assembled teams.”

Graphic designer and writer Steven Heller says that magazines once had balls.

The upcoming issue of Witness is “Captured: Writing About Film and Photography.‘” Sounds intriguing enough. Perhaps one day writing about film will seem less magical than it still does; I hope not soon. New work by B. R. Smith, Steven Wingate, Matthew Salesses, A. V. Christie, and others.

Though a new issue of Ninth Letter is always something to look forward to, since their recent design update brought them outside the box of anything being done in lit mag design this side of McSweeney’s, their new issue will no doubt be something to get a hold of. 9L Editor Philip Graham blogs about the contents of the new issue—work from Ander Monson, Benjamin Percy, Viet Dinh, John Warner, Cathy Day—and is interviewed about what goes on behind-the-scenes at the Urbana-Champaign magazine.

There is a literary magazine throw-down going on in China between literary superstars Guo Jingming and Han Han.

I think it is finally time I ordered a copy of The Lifted Brow. What put me over the edge was self-proclaimed “giant” interview by Justin Taylor with Lifted Brow editor Ronnie Scott. Here’s a bit:

Also, I don’t know how exotic you think Australia is, but maybe people just like being invited to write a story for an Australian magazine. Especially somebody like Tom Bissell, who would seem really famous to people who read this website but who doesn’t have a publisher out here. The other thing is that Tom Bissell gave us a 10,000 word chapter from his Rome book, which he’d said was basically unexcerptable. But I can publish whatever I want and just have narrow margins if I need to. So I said “Whatever Tom Bissell, just send us a really long thing, I’m sick of all your fears”. And the best part is, we still pay $1 a word, so Tom Bissell gets $10,000. Not really. I don’t think we’ve even paid Tom Bissell yet, because we’ve only just recalled that issue from the distributors and they haven’t told us the sales figures.

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.