In the last few years, the Virginia Quarterly Review has become the poster child for a successful reimagining of literary periodicals. Ted Genoways, VQR’s brilliant young editor, applied the aesthetic flexibility of zines (comics, sarcasm) to a venerable lit periodical, and began funding serious international reporting and photojournalism in a way you rarely see outside the major papers and Atlantic-league magazines.
For this reason, the current row between VQR and ZYZZVA casts interesting light on two answers to the question of what literary periodicals should do in the age of blogs. Here are the relevant links:
- April 29: On VQR’s blog, Waldo Jaquith posts a (now censored) list of amusingly nasty things VQR reviewers wrote about submissions
- May 5: Ted Genoways apologizes
- May 20: Howard Junker, editor of ZYZZVA, takes issue with Genoways’s apology
- May 20: Genoways replies with an attack on ZYZZVA’s submission-review practice
- May 21: Genoways returns to ZYZZVA to make his case for the role of the contemporary literary periodical
I’m pretty sure that this means I will now have to take advantage of ZYZZVA’s almost-free-issue offer (vs. $14 for an issue of VQR) to discover what “literature pickled in formaldehyde” smells like.
