Besides NewPages, who reviews literary magazines? What are some of the best places?
Pierce: There’s a place called Literary Magazine Review. I haven’t seen it recently, so I’m not sure if it still exists. Other than that, just a blogger here and there, reviewing cogently and thoughtfully in many cases, but not systematically. What happens that’s important for literary magazines is that prizes pay attention to them. The Pushcart Prize, Best American Stories, Best American Essays, O. Henry. Many of the prize volumes also include work from commercial glossies that publish fiction, magazines that general readers know, like Harper’s and The New Yorker. The publicity begets more publicity. Literary magazines whose contributors are chosen for prize volumes have an easier time attracting notice and subscribers. But there’s another kind of buzz, too, more subterranean—the kind that led The New York Times to profile n+1 and The Believer when they were still new and hadn’t, as far as I know, gotten work into the prize volumes yet. Considering our mission to advance contributors’
