Is The Quarterly Conversation The Greatest Online Literary Magazine Ever?
My unabashed love for is longstanding and predates all reviews/excerpts of Open Letter titles . . . In fact, I remember when we first launched Three Percent (back in the simpler, halcyon days of summer 2007 . . . ) Scott Espositon and Quarterly Conversation/Conversational Reading was by far the most oft-linked and name-checked person/publication on the blog.
But this new issue? Holy. Shit. Check out this list of features related to international literature, and then show me a magazine (print or online) as overflowing with good stuff:
- by the editors of the Quarterly Conversation;
- by George Fragopoulos;
- by Donald Brown (Yes, I know this isn’t international, but what the hell—I just got the muted post-horn from Crying of Lot 49 tattooed on my arm last week, so exceptions are being made);
- by Matthew Cheney;
- by Michael Moreci;
- by Ellen Welcker;
- A chapter of the by Nikos Kachtitsis, translated by George Fragopoulos and Lyssi Athanasiou Krikeli;
- An excerpt from Jerzy Pilch’s which Open Letter is publishing next summer;
- Reviews of Robert Walser’s the Words Without Borders anthology Gerard de Nerval’s Juan Jose Saer’s Mati Unt’s and Jorge Volpi’s
Amazing, no? And that doesn’t include the “Bonus Material” section, or what might be the best feature of them all: an epic list of recommendations of books to translate from a range of translators, agents, editors, etc.
I’m going to be going through this list as if it contained a secret explanation for the universe, and might be writing more in the future about the books referenced here, but for now, I just want to point out the strange coincidence that both Michael Emmerich and I nominated the same book . . . Granted, he’s been able to read this in the original, and I’ve just heard legends, but in my someone manic mood, this “coincidence” seems proof enough that Dogura Magura is a book that Open Letter should be publishing . . .
But back to the point: Not sure how Scott Esposito and Annie Janush and all the other editors and contributors pull this off, but thank god they do.
One improvement that would be supercool: a one-click button to print the entire issue . . .
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