In the year of our Lord 2025, amid the many attempts to silence artists and writers in this country, I find myself inclined to say yes to anyone making new spaces for writing. Founding, editing, and producing magazines in whatever form has always been an act of bravery and optimism, but it feels more powerful than ever in our present moment. The following five journals have each answered this call in their own way and publish remarkable, daring, weird, and formally adventurous work.
When I ran across a post by poet and memoirist Charles Jensen this past February announcing a new publication devoted to “literature of revenge,” I was immediately all in. Finally, I thought to myself, a magazine with the proper level of bitchiness and devotion to literary vengeance and literary feuds. Published twice a week to an e-mail list and on its website, Villain Era brings you prose and poetry and all that’s in between, with knives out. It doesn’t pay, but neither does it charge submissions fees. Like many great things, the magazine started as a joke: While grocery shopping on a Sunday morning, Jensen thought it would be a fun name for a magazine. Initially imagining it as a magazine for villanelles only, he discarded that idea before moving on to the idea of revenge. Jensen told me that he’d been going through a lot in his personal and professional life, and “the ideas of villainy and revenge were on my mind…. I realized how much I loved revenge stories and how deeply ingrained they are in literature, from Hamlet and The Tempest to The Count of Monte Cristo to something even like the TV series Revenge.” He’s correct; we are in a moment of overwhelming anger and frustration, so why should literature focus only on beauty and meaning? Villain Era gives voice to our vendettas, lets us burnish our bitchiness. As the editors say: “Let’s respect our efforts and our wounds and keep this world safe for revenge.”
On the flip side of that we find strange literary/art beast Astrolabe, either a magazine or meeting place, a “strange little intersection of arts, code, myth, and connection,” as founding editors Jae Towle Vieira and Joel Hans put it. At first the online interface is a little bit bewildering: I’m presented with a field of stars, mostly static, but a few in motion, and my eyes are drawn to those. As I click on each, the star opens up a piece of art: a story, an essay, a comic or other visual art, or something indescribable. As I click through stars, they form constellations of meaning. Founded in 2022, Astrolabe means to be a kind of anti-magazine, not driven by issues or a strict publication schedule but by an aggregation of meaning accruing over time and connection. The outlet adds new work “four times a year, on the solstices and equinoxes…these movements of stars and celestial bodies.” Astrolabe opens for submissions periodically and stays open for a month or until it reaches 150 submissions. Astrolabe pays $50 for accepted work.
Short Reads was founded by former editors of Creative Nonfiction magazine Hattie Fletcher, Anna Hall, Stephen Knezovich, and Chad Vogler in March 2023 after they left the magazine. “What began as a response to a shared loss quickly evolved into a collaborative assignment of rebuilding better,” Fletcher told me. Published weekly, Short Reads “drops a single piece of flash nonfiction into readers’ inboxes—a tiny personal essay meant to stir something human.” The work the editors publish typically has a strong narrative through-line but often has space for the weird, too. Along with the original nonfiction that makes up most of the magazine’s work, Short Reads also reprints essays, often from defunct publications. Two favorite pieces I return to are Emily Chao’s “Banana-Strawberry Smoothie” and Kosisochukwu W. Ugwuede’s “The Sound of a Thing Carrying Doom.” I really love getting e-mails every Wednesday from Short Reads; the essays are brief but pack a wallop.
Puerto del Sol goes a lot further back than the other magazines we’re talking about here, all the way back to its beginnings in 1964 as a “hand-stapled literary magazine” out of New Mexico State University. But it has modernized nicely and publishes both regular print issues with sharply designed covers and special editions and series like Black Voices, Voz (“highlighting Latinx authors and their work in an effort to combat…institutionalized silence”), and the recent mini-feature El Morro, which pays tribute to the multifaceted and layered nature of the American Southwest. According to the editors, “El Morro National Monument—known as A’ts’ina to the indigenous Zuni people—was the home of Ancestral Puebloan peoples. Later it served as a natural resting point for conquistadors, explorers, colonists, and travelers; its oasis in the New Mexico desert provided much-needed shade and water. Across hundreds of years, many people left signatures, dates, and stories carved into the rocky edifice.” The El Morro feature does not delineate work by arbitrary measures of genre at all.
Last we have Complete Sentence, a magazine of exclusively single-sentence prose. Founded by editor Jason Thayer during the COVID-19 pandemic, the magazine champions “punchy and poignant work that celebrates syntactical exploration—narratives that expand or contract within a single sentence.” Coming from an era of grief and desperation, when writing anything sustained felt impossible, Thayer thought to himself, maybe he could write a single sentence about a powerful interaction he’d just had with a neighbor—and so he did and thought he’d invite others to do the same. The sentence feels like the ideal short form for our attention-shattering present moment. How those sentences come, whether in art, comics, fiction, nonfiction, or whatever, Thayer doesn’t much care. But you will when you give them a read.
Ander Monson is the author of nine books, most recently Predator: a Movie, a Memoir, an Obsessaion (Graywolf, 2022), and the editor of Diagram, March Xness, and the New Michigan Press, among other literary projects.
Author photo: Aidan Avery