Fun with Words: Literary Magazines Thomas Jones Peruses the Best of the New Journals-But Doubts If Any Will Rival the Great Periodicals of the Past

Jones, Thomas, New Statesman (1996)

The magazine I work at, the London Review of Books, celebrates its 25th anniversary this autumn. "A quarter of a century," as Marilyn Monroe's character, Sugar Kane, says in Some Like It Hot, "makes a girl think." You might think 25 is less of a milestone for a literary magazine than it is for a starlet: the Times Literary Supplement, after all, is 102. But longevity isn't everything: many, including some of the best and most influential periodicals, don't last that long. T S Eliot abandoned the quarterly Criterion in 1939, 17 years after the first issue (which contained "The Waste Land") appeared. The 30 issues of Ian Hamilton's Review came out over a period of less than a decade; his New Review, where both Ian McEwan and Jim Crace were picked out of the slush pile, ran for only five years before it closed in 1979. And magazines are being started all the time, though few of them seem about to become the new Criterion (not to be confused with the New Criterion, as it was for a while in 1926), or even the new New Review.

Not so long ago there was a periodical called Butterfly, a design-heavy literary/lifestyle magazine edited …

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Publication information: Article title: Fun with Words: Literary Magazines Thomas Jones Peruses the Best of the New Journals-But Doubts If Any Will Rival the Great Periodicals of the Past. Contributors: Jones, Thomas - Author. Magazine title: New Statesman (1996). Volume: 133. Issue: 4706 Publication date: September 20, 2004. Page number: 53+. © Not available. COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group.

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