Literary Review Assignment

I choose the winter 2009 issue of Granta: The Magazine of New Writing. It is published by a press called LegoPrint located in Italy. It is published four times a year, March, June, September, and December. Granta is a mixed genre literary magazine that publishes poems, memoirs, short stories, photography and more. It was founded in 1889 by students at Cambridge University as an outlet for their literary experiments and political opinions. Today Granta publishes well known authors whose writing attempts to tackle and make sense of the major issues in human society. It’s website is www.granta.com. Granta is a sizable literary magazine, the one I looked at being over 300 hundred pages with many color photographs and advertisements. This particular issue has a completely black and white cover, though the cover art work changes for every issue. It is bound with a soft-cover and feels like a substantial paper-back. It does not contain a literary or political mission, though its editors do remark on the website that selections are chosen based upon the magazine’s belief in the power and urgency of the story, and the story’s fantastic ability to describe, illuminate and make real some of the world’s most important issues of the day. Granta is intended for the publication of the more experienced author, and one whose work has a serious purpose and whose general intent is to draw attention to important issues in our society. Some of the authors who have been published in Granta include Raymond Carver, Ian McEwan, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George Steiner, Graham Swift, and Tobias Wolff. One essay in particular that I read was called What I Think When I Think About Robots by Steven Hall, and though it wasn’t a poem it reminded me of Jon’s poem about the astronaut.
The second journal I choose to review was the winter 2010 edition of The Fiddlehead: Atlantic Canada’s International Literary Journal. It is published four times a year by the University of New Brunswick. It publishes short stories, poems, and personal essays and is Canada’s longest living literary journal, published for over 65 years. The Fiddlehead publishes several new poets and fiction authors every year who enter into their Fiddlehead Contest. Their literary mission is to publish good writing that contains freshness and surprise. There was a range of poems included in the journal and the majority of the pieces included in this issue were poems. Many of the poems focused upon nature or a connection with the outdoors, though there were a variety of other subjects included as well. The Fiddlehead seems to be a place to publish for less established writers than Granta, though they said their acceptance rate is around 2% of all submissions.