Pif Magazine

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Pif Magazine is one of the oldest, continually published literary zines online. Founded in 1995 by Richard Luck, the magazine has published original works by authors such as Amy Hempel, Julia Slavin, Richard Yates, and David Lehman, as well as interviews with modern literary greats like A. Manette Ansay, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jhumpa Lahiri, and William H. Gass.

[edit] Chronology

October 1995 - Issue #1 went online
October 1997 - Contributing editors Stefene Russell and Robynn Clairday join PIF.
March 1998 - Anne Doolittle joins as Poetry Editor and Camille Renshaw joins as Fiction Editor.
April 1998 - Launches "Penguin", which is for a short period of time the net's largest literary-specific search engine. Within weeks of its launch, PIF changes the name of its search engine, bowing to pressure from Penguin Books Ltd.
May 1998 - Camille Renshaw becomes Managing Editor.
August 1998 - Magazine moves to its current domain: www.pifmagazine.com.
August 2004 - Rachel Sage becomes Managing Editor.
March 2006 - Derek Alger becomes Managing Editor.

[edit] Meaning

Pif Magazine is often referred to simply as PIF. There is speculation that PIF stands for "Poetry, Interviews, and Fiction". Founder, Richard Luck has claimed that PIF is "whatever you want it to be. For me it was a typographical error on a poetry submission that reproduced well visually. That and it had a nice ring to it. It was memorable." Thomas E. Kennedy offered a different observation in his recent article on the subject.