It’s a very few magazines of the literary sort that manage anywhere close to the readership and the subscriber base that they deserve. I suspect the Virginia Quarterly Review comes close. (Aside: VQR’s editor, Ted Genoways, studied a year at Iowa. He is imminently likeable, and in class lent a considerable generosity of thought to everything. He had been editor of the Minnesota Review where, as I remember, he had published early portions of Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead. Then he got the call from VQR, and that was the last I saw of him. There was some talk that he would be given lee to finish his Ph.D. at Iowa from Charlottesville—sometimes, superstars are pandered to—but I don’t know if he followed through with it.) But even it doesn’t manage more than 100K scrips.

So here’s a good chance for you to become a new reader. Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network has arranged a smashingly good offer on subscriptions to literary magazines: for all x > 3, buy x for ( x – 1)dollars get x for the price of x – 1. (For the algebra deficient, which apparently includes myself, that means subscribe to three magazines or more, pay for one less than the number you buy.) Of the ones available, I recommend The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and, judging by the quality of its first issue, A Public Space, but there are other good ones, too.

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