Magazine Stand :: Agni – 100

The marks the world leaves. The 100th issue of AGNI exemplifies the engagement, nuance, and spirit that are AGNI’s trademark. As Editor William Pierce writes in the introductory essay, “This last year at the magazine has raised more questions about publishing and literature than any other since I started editing. About purpose and scope, meaning and place – about caring for community and actively recognizing how one’s own ideals can clash.” Pierce goes on to examine the role of literary magazines, belles lettres, “the tailings of New Criticism,” the question of merit, and “the radical act.”

This issue’s cover artist, Chitra Ganesh, welcomes readers with a playful visual rendering of “Sultana’s Dream,” a 1905 feminist utopian fiction by Rokeya Hossain. Inside, stories by Colin Winnette, Xueyi Zhou, and Monique Schwitter (translated by Susan Bernofsky) follow women’s subversion of the gaze, into places of throttled emotion. A bounty of poets, including Paisley Rekdal, J. P. Grasser, and janan alexandra, join the formal ingenuities of DeeSoul Carson, Danielle Pierrati, and others to reach a new intimacy with the past. And essayists Wiam El-Tamami, Elvis Bego, and Anna Badkhen bring a rigorous, compassionate seeing to their meditations on loss and conflict. All this and much more, including loads of online content not included in the print issue.