AGNI :: NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines

AGNI

About AGNI: A “workshop of literature where wonderful, audacious and strange things come into being.” —Bernhard Schlink, author of The Reader

Publisher’s Description: For forty years, AGNI has brought its readers the best national and international writing from established as well as emerging writers. In 2001 PEN America awarded Founding Editor Askold Melnyczuk its lifetime achievement award for magazine editing, saying, "Among readers around the world, AGNI is known for publishing important new writers early in their careers… AGNI has become one of America's, and the world's, most significant literary journals" and "a beacon of international literary culture." Ha Jin (1999 National Book Award), Jhumpa Lahiri (2000 Pulitzer Prize), and Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted) are but a few who appeared in our pages first or early on, alongside already famous names such as David Foster Wallace, Sharon Olds, and Seamus Heaney.

Housed at Boston University and edited since 2002 by essayist and literary critic Sven Birkerts, AGNI publishes two 240-page issues annually. AGNI Online, an electronic complement to the print magazine, features weekly postings of new Web-only fiction, poetry, essays, and interviews. AGNI is a 501(c)(3) charitable corporation that relies on additional support from Boston University, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and a committed roster of individual donors (www.bu.edu/agni/friends-of-agni.html).

Recent issues:

AGNI #76: Fiery significations—of place, of past, of self. Artist Lesley Dill’s striking figurations set the tone of engaged encounter. Nonfiction by Jeffrey Mehlman, John Kinsella, Dinah Lenney, Susan McCallum-Smith, and others. Stories by David Huddle, Wendy Rawlings, Tamas Dobozy, and Victoria Lancelotta; poetry from Sharon Olds, Eamon Grennan, David Wojahn, Patricia Lockwood, with translations by Christopher Middleton, Hoyt Rogers, and Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough.

AGNI #75: Trails of mastery, echoes of influence. This first issue of our 40th-anniversary year features a portfolio of photographs of Robert Lowell, never before published, by Robert Gardner , with responses and reminiscences from an array of writers, including C. K. Williams, Fanny Howe, Lloyd Schwartz, Claudia Rankine, Tom Sleigh, Gail Mazur, and Robert Pinsky. Other contents include stories by Edith Pearlman and Vince Passaro, poems by David Wagoner, Connie Voisine, Emilia Phillips, Adam Day, Bob Hicok, and Jill McDonough, and translated work by Osip Mandelstam, Yves Bonnefoy and Husch Josten.

AGNI #74: Sifting for fresh versions of the known. An art portfolio of odd objects, served up by Jody Servon and Lorene Delany-Ullman, captures something of the larger idiosyncrasy of this issue, which features, among other offerings, poetry by Amy Gerstler, Sherman Alexie, Carol Ann Davis, and Rainer Maria Rilke (from the German and from the French); fiction by Helen DeWitt and Rachel Swearingen; a generous array of nonfiction by Sarah Braunstein, Jonathan Wilson, Robert Boyers, and many others, as well as a conversation with the startlingly unusual Yahia Lababidi.