Format: In Print and Online

Taking cues from Letters to a Young Poet, published more than seventy years ago, the Letters to Poets project puts an updated spin on Rilke’s experiment in mentorship with organized correspondence between two distinct types of poets.

When fiction writer Barry Eisler heard last summer that Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, California, would close after fifty years in business, his first reaction was a loud expletive. His second was an e-mail to owner Clark Kepler with an offer to help. "I used to see those big author photos in the window…and I was working on what would become my first novel," says Eisler, the author of the Jain Rain series of thrillers. "My fantasies of literary success were all based on doing book signings at Kepler's."

Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features Ploughshares, Calyx, Gargoyle, and American Short Fiction.

Art from Up Is Up, but So Is Down, a collection of writing and more than 125 photographs, book covers, and flyers that illustrate the dynamic, subversive work of the literary community known as "Downtown."