HTML Giant launches a Literary Magazine Club

HTML Giant is a literary website that has become an exciting place for aspiring writers with an edge to convene, conspire and commisserate. Today it announced the launch of its own kind of online book club.

Like most book clubs, the Literary Magazine Club asks its members to read and discuss a single work together. As the name says, however, instead of reading a book, the club will be reading a literary magazine. The first will be an issue of New York Tyrant.

"Publishing may be dying, but there are countless writers and editors who have not been notified of this untimely end coming to pass," writes Roxanne Gay in her introduction to the LMC. "The plethora of literary magazines actively contributing to the literary conversation are ample evidence, for me, that we have not lost the battle to other forms of entertainment. We’re very much in the fight."

Many of HTML Giant's frequenters are aspiring young writers who take their work seriously, who are just getting started publishing.

Literary magazines have typically been the best places for a hopeful writer to get a start -- only the rarest novice author finds a home at a major magazine like the New Yorker -- so it makes sense to feed the literary magazine ecosystem. A literary magazine club, if people play along, may do so both economically and intellectually.

After NY Tyrant, the club will turn its attention to the year-old, online only journal the Collagist and the 29-year-old signature print journal Ploughshares, each of which has a reputation for publishing slightly different kinds of smart literary fiction. The conversation about New York Tyrant is beginning now.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Image: from NY Tyrant

Comments

[alejandro]

Wow. The Tyrant just keeps getting better and better, doesn't it? I keep waiting for them to put out a bad issue and jump the shark but nope. Each issue is better than the next. I want to join this book club!

[Margaret Brown]

I love this idea and hope that HTML Giant will add new digital-only Shelf Unbound indie book review magazine to its list. Shelf Unbound features the best of small press, university press, and self-published books. ... I don't believe publishing is dying at all, it is evolving. The digital age is creating enormous opportunity for writers, publishers, readers ... and trees.