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News
Danielle Pender’s beloved magazine has undergone a ‘super chic’ rebrand, with its latest issue featuring writing from Sheena Patel, Halima Jibril, Charlie Porter and more
When Riposte Magazine first launched in 2013, it quickly cultivated a space for the culturally avid and curious. Independent magazines were blossoming with fresh points of view, fostering communities with each conceptual revolution and zine drop. Ione Gamble’s Polyester was growing, a sparkling ode to having ‘faith in your own bad taste’ and a challenge to what we should both hold close and explode of girlhood. Kieran Yates’ British Values was celebrating the UK’s immigrant communities, while Strike! Magazine was anarchically swinging at the publishing industry, and Mushpit was running all over London to its own mad melody.
“2013 feels like a really long time ago,” says founder Danielle Pender today. “It was before #MeToo, the women’s march, and the Black Lives Matter movement had just started in July of that year. Tumblr was still at its peak, we hadn’t been Girlbossed yet, and Obama was still president.”
Riposte, founded and edited by writer and Watching Women and Girls author Pender, took on societal pressure points for women and the subsequent solidarity borne from them. “We were originally railing against the narrow representation of women in the media and writing features on forgotten women; it feels almost quaint now,” she says. “The magazine evolved and became a lot more progressive. I’m really proud of the women we platformed and the features we published, especially the more political articles and social commentary pieces.”
We are a publisher of quality children’s books. We publish a wide range of books, including board books, beginning readers, picture books, and select middle grade titles. We accept both fiction and nonfiction submissions. We are committed to the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion and welcome stories from diverse authors. Please browse our website or catalog for examples of the types of books we publish.
The Unwin Award has today announced that submissions are now open for the inaugural year of this new literary award recognising non-fiction authors in the earlier stages of their careers whose work is considered to have made a significant contribution to the world.
The award, administered by the Publishers Association, aims to "champion and showcase the value of the UK publishing industry to the world". The Unwin Award has been made possible following a donation from the Unwin Charitable Trust.
Worth £10,000, the winner of The Unwin Award will be awarded to the author for their overall body of work (comprising no more than three non-fiction books), rather than being associated with a specific title.
The award will be judged by an independent panel of judges, which will be announced shortly, with a shortlist revealed in February 2025 and the winner at a ceremony in April 2025.
UK publishers are now invited to submit up to three authors per imprint that fulfil the submission criteria: full information on The Unwin Award eligibility and submission guidelines can be found here.
The organization’s official statement highlights the complexity of AI as a broad technological category, making it difficult to entirely endorse or reject. It also underscores the social implications of AI use, suggesting that to oppose AI outright ignores the realities of class and ability disparities.
According to NaNoWriMo, some writers may turn to AI for practical reasons, such as financial constraints or cognitive challenges that make traditional writing methods less accessible.
As NaNoWriMo’s statement explains: “Not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing. For some writers, the decision to use AI is a practical, not an ideological, one. The financial ability to engage a human for feedback and review assumes a level of privilege that not all community members possess.”
The organization also points out that underrepresented minorities are less likely to secure traditional publishing deals, which forces many into the indie author space where upfront costs can be prohibitive. AI tools, in these cases, might provide essential support that enables them to pursue their writing goals.
Articles
“Thomas Pynchon is a young writer, just twenty, who has previously published fiction in Epoch. He is a Cornell graduate and now lives in Seattle.”
Writers know that the time between when a piece is accepted by a literary magazine and when it is actually published can be rather protracted—my longest span was three years—and by the time Thomas Pynchon appeared in the Spring 1960 issue of The Kenyon Review, he was a still-young 23. He’d just graduated from Cornell, his time there split by a stint in the Navy. He worked for Boeing in Seattle—writing for Bomarc Service News, an internal newsletter.
Although tasked with writing technical pieces about anti-aircraft missiles, Pynchon was characteristically wry. In “The Mad Hatter and the Mercury Wetted Relays,” Pynchon informs readers that Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter had gone mad from “chronic mercurialism” or “hatter’s shakes,” which could affect Boeing workers if certain wire-wrapped glass capsules explode. “When dealing with mercury,” Pynchon warns, “even in small amounts, respect it and play it safe. Don’t become a ‘Mad Hatter,’ you might find it to be much more unpleasant than attending a mad tea party.”
The same jaunty rhythms mark “Entropy,” Pynchon’s story in The Kenyon Review. Although he would later dismiss the piece as an example of “overwriting,” something “too conceptual, too cute and remote,” the story is playfully chaotic—the type of glorious excess for which literary magazines are made.
In the latest “Craftwork” episode, Declan Meade talks with Brad about starting and editing a literary magazine. He is the founding editor and publisher of The Stinging Fly, one of the world’s premiere literary magazines, based in Dublin, Ireland. You may have read about Declan and The Stinging Fly in the New York Times back in April 2023, in a feature story by Max Ufberg.
Brad Listi: What about for people listening who might want to submit, but also people who might have an interest in starting their own magazine? I’d be interested to hear you talk about the editorial process when somebody gets a yes, and what in general the editorial process entails at the Stinging Fly. I have to believe that it’s lovely to get a story where you feel like it’s almost all done. And usually I think when a writer is in command of the work, there usually isn’t a ton to do. But are there instances where the work is like 75 percent of the way there, and in the editorial process you get the rest of the way? What does it look like for somebody who gets a yes to work with you in an editorial capacity?
hristian Lorentzen, the former book critic for New York Magazine, is a longtime contributor to Bookforum, the London Review of Books and Harper’s Magazine.
I was the boy who loved magazines. At home, my parents would confiscate the copies of Mad, Ray Gun and Spin that came in the mail, forbidding me from so much as looking at them until I finished my homework. My appetite for glossy pictures, for clever cartoons, for punning prose — for all the intelligence I couldn’t find in my small town or on television — had to be suppressed, lest I fail out of school. (So thought my mother.) Even now, the arrival of the latest issue of the Baffler or New Left Review feels like an event: a new vision of the world as seen by many minds, wedged between two covers.
But the American magazine is in a state of decay. Now known mostly as brands, once sumptuous print publications exist primarily as websites or YouTube channels, hosts for generic scribblings, the ever-ubiquitous “take.” Meanwhile, a thousand Substacks bloom, some of them very good, with writers in the emancipated state of being paid directly by their readers. Yet even in this atomized, editorless landscape, perverse incentives apply. Are you thirsty for another post about cancel culture or wokeness? Me neither. Yet culture war still largely rules the day.
Australia’s literary journals are produced in a fragile ecosystem propped up by a patchwork of volunteer labour, generous patrons and, with any luck, a small slice of government funding.
The Sydney Review of Books, the Australian Book Review and Overland were among a group of publications who sought four-year funding from the Australia Council in 2020 but were unsuccessful.
These publications join the ranks of many others – among them Meanjin and Island – defunded by state or federal arts funding bodies in recent years.
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