I read

Once upon a time -- before digital -- I searched out small press and university press magazines (like the one pictured at left) to read poetry and fiction by authors whose work was either discovery or homecoming. Many of the magazines lasted no more than a season -- oh, but what a season! I discovered the work of Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney, Carolyn Forché and Marge Piercy (among many, many others) in the pages of small press magazines. It is not exaggeration to say that those encounters on the page changed my life.

These days, I spend nearly two-thirds of my time reading online -- which is, it has to be said, quite a different experience. And still ... the stories and poems that resonate long after you've gone on to the next thing, the ones that years from now you'll remember happening upon ... haven't changed. They continue to be published by the digital equivalent of those small and university presses. Same love for the written word, the story, the writer undiscovered or underrepresented or deserving of wider readership.

So I find myself searching out the current issue of these magazines the way I used to hunt through the shelves for their print-only antecedents. A couple are only semi-digital (Bull Spec and Dappled Things); others are both digital and print (Crossed Genres and GUD magazine); a few are purely digital (Cabinet des Fees, Strange Horizons, Enchanted Conversation). A least one (Cuento magazine) takes shape and form specifically from its internet birthplace.

No matter the specifics, these are worth checking out, again and again.

Bull Spec

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Cabinet des Fees

Crossed Genres 

Cuento magazine

Dappled Things

Enchanted Conversation

Goblin Fruit

GUD magazine
(While a nasty hard-drive crash pushed back publication dates, this feisty magazine is still going. Not exclusively SF/F, and far more European than most of the magazines I list here, this is a consistently intriguing magazine with writers who deserve to be considered top tier. Really, one of my favorites. Consider buying a subscription!)

Stone Telling

Strange Horizons