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News
Ragaire, a new Irish literary magazine championing inventive and imaginative writing, encouraging readers to explore new pathways in poetry and prose, will be launched in Galway.
The first issue of Ragaire Literary Magazine, founded by Galway natives Cormac Culkeen (North Galway ), Tara O’Malley (Connemara ) and Aileen McCarthy (Galway City ), will be launched in The PorterShed, Market Street, Galway City, on Friday, May 24 at 6:30pm. There will be a selection of readings at the event from contributors to the debut issue.
‘Ragaire’ is an old Irish word for a person who enjoys late-night wandering and exploring. It embodies the new magazine’s determination to break the mould in the field of Irish literary publications.
“We want to find and promote writers who travel the road less taken and literary work that contains something different in content, structure or form,” says Cormac Culkeen. “We want our magazine to be a light for those travellers, a place to bring their poems and stories, those lines of life.”
The first issue contains 10 short stories and 28 poems, and was drawn from around 800 submissions. It contains work by Galway and Irish writers like Fred Johnston and Neil McCarthy, as well as a host of international writers from across the globe. The collection concludes with ‘Two Poets On The Go Bus’, a tribute to the late poet, critic and activist, Kevin Higgins, by Galway writer Attracta Fahy.
Are you ready to take a trip?
Elastic, a biannual print magazine of psychedelic art and literature that will debut in spring 2025, aims to publish art and writing that’s “immersive, dreamlike, daring, genre- and time-bending, and that acts to expand the mind and the vast possibilities of narrative.”
Founding editor-in-chief Hillary Brenhouse was previously the editorial director of Bold Type Books and editor-in-chief of Guernica magazine. She’ll be joined by editor Meara Sharma, formerly the editor-in-chief of Adi magazine, and a body of contributing editors and artists that includes Jaquira Diaz, Amanda Gunn, Laura van den Berg, Jia Sung, Amber Sparks, and Darian Longmire. The magazine is being supported in part by grants from UC Berkeley and Harvard as part of their Psychedelics in Society and Culture initiative.
The Nature Writing Prize for Working Class Writers returns for its fifth year, offering one year’s free membership to Campaign for National Parks, a £300 paid commission to write a National Parks-inspired piece for Viewpoint Magazine and an Arvon course of choice.
The winner will also receive three one-hour mentoring sessions with a Gaia commissioner, a one-hour mentoring session with a literary agent and a book bundle from Octopus Publishing Group.
The prize, which aims to break down barriers, was set up in 2020 by the writer Natasha Carthew to create opportunity for working-class nature writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. It is supported by Arvon Foundation, the Campaign for National Parks and Gaia, an imprint of Octopus Publishing Group. The prize is free to enter and encourages self-identifying working-class writers from all over the UK, whether they live in the country or in towns, cities and other spaces.
I read broadly across fiction and narrative non-fiction. I am usually first pulled in by a unique concept or setting, but what keeps me reading are beautifully drawn, complex characters, relationships, and family dynamics. I enjoy reading fantasy and romance and I am particularly on the lookout for a story which has a slow burn at its heart, full of angst and drama. I have a deep love for Irish fiction both in terms of Irish writers, and novels set in Ireland. I enjoy crime fiction and true crime writing that subverts the genre and focuses on the victim or the fallout for their family. In terms of non-fiction, I enjoy issues led narrative writing with a personal story at its heart and particularly love hearing from underrepresented voices. I am also interested in psychology and therapy. My non-fiction reading varies broadly from comedians to experts and journalists, but what I am always looking for is an authentic voice that will teach me something fascinating or share a very personal journey with me.
Articles
At CNN, Leah Asmelash laments the demise of many “long-standing” literary magazines. “The Believer,” she writes, which was started in 2003, “was once at the top of the literary magazine game. A leading journal of art and culture, the Believer published the work of icons like Leslie Jamison, Nick Hornby and Anne Carson. It won awards, it launched careers.” But the University of Nevada, which has housed the magazine since 2017, announced that it was shutting it down: “In a statement explaining the decision, the dean of the school’s College of Liberal Arts called print publications like the Believer ‘a financially challenging endeavor.’”
Oh, boy. Leslie Jamison, an icon? The Believer, a publication that “launched careers”? The only thing missing here is some theme music and a “CNN exclusive” or two.
Asmelash goes on to write about a handful of literary magazines housed at universities with MFA programs that are also shutting down — the Alaska Quarterly Review and the Sycamore Review, among others. We get the predictable “It wasn’t always this way” about halfway through:
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.
“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.
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.
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