HTMLGIANT has, for a little while now, run a magazine club. Members read a lit mag together and discuss the various themes, stories, design, etc. I think this is a great idea. Far too often lit mags feel disposable. You can pick them up, read a few stories or poems you want to read, and ignore the rest. But the best magazines work more like books. They need to be read in their entirety. I think here of magazines like NOON or McSweeney's (and, hopefully, Gigantic).
The most recent lit mag club has been examining Beecher's #1. In addition to being an extremely beautifully (and minimally) designed magazine, and a brilliantly edited magazine, Beecher's includes a few stories of mine as well as stories by several close friends of mine like John Dermot Woods, Rozalia Jovanovic, Joshua Cohen, and James Yeh. The latest lit mag club entry, by Daniel B. Cecil, talks about interactive/game narratives and has some very nice comments about one of my stories:
Second person narration is used throughout the journal to back the reader into a corner as well. In Lincoln Michel’s “A Question of Commitment,” you are asked as a participant to imagine both a lover and murderer in the same story. The murder, however, isn’t clear, and that uncertainty, paired with the second person narration that draws you into the story, begs you to imagine two terrible possibilities. It is a horrifying take on the “choose your own adventure stories” we’re so familiar with from our childhood.
Anyway, check out lit mag club and check out Beecher's!
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