The Threepenny Review

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

San Francisco's Fraenkel Gallery was the source for this 1939 Frank Navara photo, Coffee Pot, Ohio, featured on the cover of The Threepenny Review 83 (Fall 2000).
San Francisco's Fraenkel Gallery was the source for this 1939 Frank Navara photo, Coffee Pot, Ohio, featured on the cover of The Threepenny Review 83 (Fall 2000).

The Threepenny Review is an American literary magazine now in its third decade. It is published in Berkeley, California by founding editor Wendy Lesser. Maintaining a quarterly schedule (March, June, September, December), it offers fiction, memoirs, poetry, essays and criticism to a readership of 10,000. Without the support of patrons or a university, the publication has an annual budget of $200,000.[1]

The magazine was launched in 1980 after Lesser (then 27 years old with no editing experience) was a guest editor of Ron Nowicki's San Francisco Review of Books. She found the experience so rewarding that she decided to create her own publication, and the first issue of The Threepenny Review appeared three months later.[2] She chose the title for its "obvious Brechtian overtones."[3]

It sometimes features an essay symposium, as described by critic Deborah Mead in reviewing issue 104 (Winter 2006):

What sets The Threepenny Review apart from other little magazines is its cultural essays. A frequent feature of this journal is the symposium, a series of essays on a single topic. The essayists in this issue focus on plot, many writing to defend plot from its current disfavor, although Geoff Dyer chimes in to denigrate plot some more. Other essays tackle unexpected topics—music and pain, Dylan’s worst song, the placebo effect—with insight and lucidity.[4]

Contents

[edit] Contributors

Poetry from the magazine has frequently been reprinted in the Best American Poetry series. Authors published in the magazine include Jacob M. Appel, André Aciman, John Berger, Frank Bidart, Jane Bowles, Anne Carson, Maud Casey, T. J. Clark, Margaret Drabble, Geoff Dyer, Deborah Eisenberg, Louise Glück, Seamus Heaney, A. L. Kennedy, August Kleinzahler, Philip Levine, David Mamet, Greil Marcus, Sigrid Nunez, Cynthia Ozick, Dale Peck, Adam Phillips, Robert Pinsky, Kay Ryan, Oliver Sacks, Luc Sante, Elizabeth Tallent, Lawrence Weschler and Frederick Wiseman.

The Threepenny Review has published more literary work of Javier Marías than any other American magazine. Cover art, often selected from works at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has run the gamut from Edward Hopper to W. Eugene Smith.

On June 16, 2006 Lesser created an online ancillary spin-off for her own writing, The Lesser Blog. A selection of various contributions to The Threepenny Review can also be read at the magazine's website.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Lee, Felicia. "A Little Journal for Nearly Every Literary Voice," The New York Times, December 27, 2004.
  2. ^ Guthmann, Edward. "Threepenny Review marks 25 years of doggedly panning for literary gold," San Francisco Chronicle, January 7, 2005.
  3. ^ Bolick, Katie. "Truth Enters In" The Atlantic: Atlantic Unbound, March 17, 1999.
  4. ^ Mead, Deborah. Literary Magazines: "The New Pages Literary Magazine Reviews"

[edit] See also

[edit] External links