NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines

AGNI

Publisher’s Description: For over thirty-five 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 (www.agnimagazine.org), 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:

#70: Celebrations and skewerings. The writing life laid bare in fiction by Ken Kalfus, Giles Harvey, and Melissa Pritchard; essays by Peter LaSalle and Norman Lock; and poems by Victoria Chang and Alexander Long. Other work by Simon Armitage, Tomaz Salamun, Maxine Scates, Mary O’Donoghue, Douglas Bauer, Mimi Schwartz, and many others. Plus a mind-stretching art feature and cover by Joomi Chung, and a special section in which writers and fellow artists commemorate the life of painter Michael Mazur.

#69: Radical compressions and striking explosions. Brian Christian proposes a radical theory of art as information, and Senior Editor Bill Pierce riffs out further connections, while artist Aldwyth (as elucidated by fellow-artist Rosamond Purcell) offers uncannily apt illustration. Lovers’ beds abound—in fiction by Gary Amdahl, Michael Mejia, and Margo Berdeshevsky—and poets, including Adam Day, Garrett Keizer, Eva Hooker, and Deborah Pease, find what’s fresh and disturbing in the nothing new that is under the sun.

#68: Inscapes and crossings. Michael Mazur’s cover rendering of Dantean passage sets the tone for an issue rich with transformative broodings and hard-won exclamations. Poetry by Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, Richard Kenney, Alan Williamson, and many others resonates against powerful translations of Vasyl Makhno, Tomas Venclova, René Char, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Nelly Sachs. Stories by Charles Haverty, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Anis Shivani, and Gary Amdahl seem to call to nuanced meditations by Lia Purpura, Brian Christian, and Nadia Gregor. This is a partial listing, to be sure. The issue also features a first-ever DVD—Robert Gardner’s documentary celebration of our portfolio artist Michael Mazur at work on his print illustrations of Robert Pinsky’s striking translations of the Italian master.