Village Voice Bookshop

The Village Voice Bookshop carries a selection of literary reviews and magazines. Featured below are a few of the publications you will find at the shop.

The Believer

First published in April 2003, the literary magazine was created by Dave Eggers of McSweeney's Publishing in San Francisco, and friends who planned to "focus on writers and books we like", with a nod to "the concept of the inherent Good." Its editors are the novelists Vendela Vida and Heidi Julavits, and editor Ed Park, who also edits for The Village Voice. The Believer is published in 9 issues per year, including annual Art, Music, and Film issues that sometimes feature a CD or DVD insert. In 2005, it was printing about 15,000 copies of its regular issues. The Believer is a magazine, as its editor Heidi Julavits writes, urges readers and writers to "reach beyond their usual notions of what is accessible or possible." The magazine publishes essays which the critic Peter Carlson describes as "highbrow but delightfully bizarre,", book reviews that may assess writers of other eras, and interviews with writers, artists, musicians and directors, often conducted by colleagues in their fields. The critic A.O. Scott described the magazine as part of "a generational struggle against laziness and cynicism, to raise once again the banners of creative enthusiasm and intellectual engagement." It has a "cosmopolitan frame of reference and an eclectic internationalism", mixing pop genres with literary theory.

The magazine is being sold primarily in independent bookstores and draws on a stable of recurring features, including book reviews, interviews, installments from a variety of authors, letters from readers, etc. Notable monthly features include "Sedaratives," an advice column founded by Amy Sedaris that hosts a guest contributor every month. Contributors included Buck Henry, Eugene Mirman, and Thomas Lennon. Recently revived is the column "Stuff I've Been Reading" by Nick Hornby, a mixture of book discussion and musings. Other columns include "Real Life Rock Top Ten: A Monthly Column of Everyday Culture and Found Objects," written by Greil Marcus, and "Musin's and Thinkin's," written by Jack Pendarvis. All issues include a two-page, multi-color feature called "Schema," which has ranged from "Forensic Sketches of Literary Criminals" to "Habitats of Regional Burger Chains".

Illustrations and cartoons are featured throughout the magazine. The cover illustrations are done by Charles Burns, while most of the other portraits and line drawings are by Tony Millionaire. The Believer debuted a comics section in the 2009 Art Issue, edited by Alvin Buenaventura, that includes strips by Anders Nilsen, Lilli Carré, and Matt Furie. These comics are exclusive to the print edition of the magazine.

The Believer website

Granta Magazine

Granta was founded in 1889 by students at Cambridge University as The Granta, edited by R. C. Lehmann (who later became a major contributor to Punch). It was started as a periodical featuring student politics, badinage and literary efforts. The name is an older form of what is today called the River Cam, the river that runs through the town. An early editor of the magazine was R. P. Keigwin, the English cricketer and Danish scholar. In this form the magazine had a long and distinguished history. The magazine published juvenilia of several writers who later became well known, including: Bertram Fletcher Robinson; Michael Frayn; Ted Hughes; John Simpson; A. A. Milne; Sylvia Plath; and Stevie Smith.

During the 1970s the publication, faced with financial difficulties and increasing levels of student apathy, was rescued by a group of interested postgraduates. In 1979, it was successfully relaunched as a magazine of "new writing", with both writers and audience drawn from the world beyond Cambridge. Bill Buford (who wrote Among the Thugs originally as a project for the journal) was the editor for its first 16 years in the new incarnation; Ian Jack followed him, editing Granta from 1995 until 2007. In April 2007 it was announced that Jason Cowley, editor of the Observer Sport Monthly, would succeed Jack as editor in September 2007. Cowley redesigned and relaunched the magazine and launched a new website; in September 2008 he became editor of the New Statesman, and Alex Clark, a former deputy literary editor of The Observer, succeeded him as the publication's first female editor. In late May 2009, Clark left the publication, and John Freeman, the American editor, took over. The Village Voice Bookshop has hosted several events with the particpation of Granta Magazine.

Granta Magazine website

The Paris Review

Founded in Paris by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton in 1953, The Paris Review began with a simple editorial mission: “Dear reader,” William Styron wrote in a letter in the inaugural issue, “The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work — fiction and poetry — not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines and putting it pretty much where it belongs, i.e., somewhere near the back of the book. I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they're good.”

Decade after decade, the Review has introduced the important writers of the day. Adrienne Rich was first published in its pages, as were Philip Roth, V. S. Naipaul, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Mona Simpson, Edward P. Jones, and Rick Moody. Selections from Samuel Beckett's novel Molloy appeared in the fifth issue, one of his first publications in English. The magazine was also among the first to recognize the work of Jack Kerouac, with the publication of his short story, “The Mexican Girl,” in 1955. Other milestones of contemporary literature, now widely anthologized, also first made their appearance in The Paris Review: Italo Calvino's Last Comes the Raven, Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus, Donald Barthelme's Alice, Jim Carroll's Basketball Diaries, Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Virgin Suicides, and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.

In addition to the focus on original creative work, the founding editors found another alternative to criticism — letting the authors talk about their work themselves. The Review’s Writers at Work interview series offers authors a rare opportunity to discuss their life and art at length; they have responded with some of the most revealing self-portraits in literature. Among the interviewees are William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Joan Didion, Seamus Heaney, Ian McEwan, and Lorrie Moore. In the words of one critic, it is “one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world.”

The Paris Review website