NewPages Guide to Literary Magazines

 

AGNI 66 cover

AGNI

Boston University
236 Bay State Road
Boston, MA  02215
Phone: (617) 353-7135 Fax: (617) 353-7134
E-mail: agni@bu.edu
Web: www.agnimagazine.org
Simultaneous submissions: yes Email submissions: no Reading period:  9/1-5/31 Response time: 2-4 months Payment: yes (see website) Contests: no ISSN: 0191-3352 Founded: 1972 Issues per year: 2 Distributors: Ingram Periodicals Average pages: 240 Copy Price: $9.95 (free to librarians and booksellers) Subscription (Individuals): $17 Subscription (Libraries): $20

Publisher’s Description: For over thirty 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/about/friends/donors.html).

 

 

Recent issues:

#67
Voice and transformation. The issue features a deep reckoning of friendship by Roland Merullo, a recollection of a mentor by Jhumpa Lahiri, and sharp, smart idiosyncrasies by Sarah Gorham and David Rivard. Playing against these are antic and bittersweet stories by Perle Besserman, Ken Kalfus, and Vladimir Makanin, among others. Here are writers marking how the self broods—broods, and then flips loss onto its turtle back; how it damns the damnable and laughs out at all that is tangled and absurd. Pilar Coover’s hallucinatory visual textures aptly counterpoint the voices, which also include those of poets Matt Donovan, Amy Beeder, Paula Closson Buck, Bruce Smith, and Derek Walcott.

#66
Vernaculars, inward and international. Heeding the issue number, we think of Route 66, the legendary American highway, cutting through Ben Miller’s uniquely essayistic Midwest, Jill McCorkle’s and Tara Goedjen’s fictional South, and painter Benny Andrews’ anguished and ecstatic historical South, before jumping off the atlas to take in Peter Balakian’s epical 9/11 sequences, Melissa Green’s topographies of the heart, and William T. Vollmann’s mytho-erotic fantasia. Vernaculars go international and rise into song, with Harrison Solow’s portrait of Welsh tenor Timothy Evans (the first-ever AGNI CD is included). Poetry by Steve Gehrke, Jordan Smith, Erica Funkhouser, and others. Essays by Scott Diel, Stephen O’Connor, Alta Ifland, and Askold Melnyczuk. And more.

 

#65
Vast spans, subtle scapes: Tom Burckhardt’s stunning art feature, its images ranging from American urban to the Arctics and Asias of the imagination, announces the range of this issue. Richard Tillinghast’s real-life Istanbul jostles Kenneth Wong’s fictional Rangoon and Tomas Tranströmer’s lyric Swedish meditations. David Gates’s voice-fugue channels Samuel Beckett, and Kim Addonizio moves the spirit of Chet Baker through her lines of longing and loss. Stories by Peter LaSalle, Edith Pearlman, Magdalena Tulli, Vince Passaro, and others. Poets include Stuart Dischell, Karl Kirchwey, and Debra Nystrom. Essays: Lia Purpura, Marie Mutsuki Mockett, and William Pierce.


#64
Changing ecologies of information, fragmented certainties. Sets up a vigorous call-and-response between fictions of eerie dislocation (Michael Mejia, Rick Moody, and Vincent Czyz) and essays of interrogation and witness—by William Pierce, Lia Purpura, Joel Brouwer, Wendy Rawlings, and others. Poets like Campbell McGrath, Christopher Middleton, Matt Donovan, and Leslie Wheeler are buttressed by a stylistically singular portfolio of British and Irish poetry edited by Kathryn Maris and Maurice Riordan of Poetry London magazine. A portfolio of visual art by Leslie Sutcliffe uses the logic of likeness as a basis for reassembly and restoration.

#63
Where mind meets intuition. Powerful exploratory fiction by Paul Eggers, Alexandra Chasin, Melanie Rae Thon, Maja Novak, and Phong Nguyen; poems by Alpay Ulku, Sandra McPherson, Donald Platt, Friedrich Hölderlin, and others; sui generis essays by Joan Wickersham, Ben Miller, Christopher Livaccari, A. P. Miller, and Charles Bardes—all held in the presiding visual force-field of artist Christopher Gausby.