Just when you think all’s lost, the culture’s gone to shit, and who gives a damn about reading and books anyway, surprising things start to happen. New bookstores pop up, new presses arise, new literary journals have new writers filling their pages with extravagant tales and visions AI will never imagine (because one thing it can’t do is imagine). There’s the journal Duck, hatched in Cambridge’s legendary Grolier Bookshop by James Fraser and Bella Bennett; a new international journal, Literally, stirring the pot in Paris, stewarded by Anna Vallee and Amanda McKay; there’s the Drift, docked by Rebecca Panovka and Kiara Barrow in Brooklyn, whose stories colonized Best American Short Stories 2025, and plenty more I can’t plot. So I say to young writers, listen to the old songs, to Kafka who says: We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. Fear nothing—neither the pang of rejection nor the riskier high of success. We’ll always need great poems and novels to, as Flaubert said, do what nature does: set us dreaming.
—Askold Melnyczuk, founding editor, Agni and Arrowsmith Press