The literary magazine is one of those media animals that’s always struggled to get by. A labour of love more than a venture for profit, its contributors, editors and backers are almost exclusively aesthetes – that is, people with a highly developed sense of the artistic, people who’d rather spend their time constructing or enjoying a beautiful paragraph than getting paid by the hour. As such, the costs associated with the printed word – printing, paper, distribution – have tended to sink literary magazines faster than Spanish warships at the Battle of Trafalgar.
Enter Electric Literature, a New York-based quarterly literary magazine that allows readers the opportunity to savour its product on Kindle, e-book, iPhone or print-on-demand paper. The brainchild of two MFA writing graduates, Electric Literature has already published such big-name US scribes as Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis and Jim Shepard. In November, award-winning novelist Ricky Moody will tweet a short story via the brand in three days.
The price of subscription for the electronic version is US$24, and US$48 if you insist on reading in dead-tree format. So far, 800 subscribers have signed up, with 1,600 literature buffs having bought single issues. Those figures could soon rocket through the roof, though – gushing reviews on the magazine have been published everywhere from knock-and-drop blogs to The Washington Post and New York Times.
Read more: New York Times