There has been a surge in the number of literary journals that request, review, and publish works online. Many of these have long existed in print form before moving onto the web, but some are recent organizations that take a modern approach to the representation of literature and artwork. We asked our interns for their favorite literary journals. This is the list we compiled, in no particular order.
Front Porch – “Front Porch just feels classy. I love the layout with the stationary background image with the scrolling text box.”
failbetter.com – “This magazine felt really well-suited to the online medium. Every story has a link to social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, where you can ‘like’ what you’ve read. They have a mobile site, which I think will be increasingly important, and their forward thinking seems to be a strong point.”
Coal Hill Review – “This site has a very professional, sophisticated feel about it and features contests and contest winners in different genres.”
The Adirondack Review – “[This is] a beautiful online site, which is easy to navigate and chock full of great literature.”
The Cafe Irreal – “What I enjoy the most from this simple website is definitely the content. It has many issues and the simple design sets a good aura to the whole website.”
Exquisite Corpse – “I like that the website is not used as a prop to enhance the work – the work is simply good on its own and often in spite of its unprofessional presentation.”
Restless: An Arts Anthology – “They do incredible work formatting the ‘zine for the internet. They work art into the pages so that it’s not a large wall of text, which makes reading both easier and more interesting.”
Electric Literature – “I like that this site is using different media to get literature across to a wider audience than print alone can. The site is visually stimulating and you can read it on any medium – computer, smartphone, tablet.”
Blackbird – “I enjoy that Blackbird is so academic. There are a great many reviews and academic essays published in every issue that hardly ever fail to be interesting and educational.”
- Tread Lightly On This Storied Pavement: Michael Engelhard’s No Walk in the Park - April 29, 2024
- Launch Party Today - April 26, 2024
- Meet the Nonfiction Contributors for Issue 33 - April 25, 2024
Thanks for the list. Some of these I have not seen yet and will be checking out soon!
Yes, thanks for putting that list together and pointing out a few that I had overlooked.
Ugh. For the record: I am posting this from my phone and didn’t realize that it would automatically include that spam link at the end of my comment.
Shawnte, thanks for your comment. We appreciate it. And it wasn’t you–we use a plug-in called CommentLuv that makes that linkback because we like to see what our readers are up to.
It’s amazing to see how much literature is out there on the web. I haven’t even heard of some of these sites! I’m going to have to check them out 🙂
I had heard of a few of these (EQ, Adirondack Review) but not others. I will add them to the list. I’m always on the lookout for new prose and poetry.
This list is great. You really can’t go wrong. Thanks to these websites, I can procrastinate better than ever!
This list is great, needs some update, but thanks for sharing with us.
Blackbird is my prefered
that’s great to hear.