The Beirut39 project began in March of 2009, at the Abu Dhabi Book Fair, when organizers threw open the following call: They wanted the 39 best young writers from what’s dubiously known as “the Arab World.” Organizers, who had already selected the “Bogota39” in 2007, gave their criteria: Writers must be under 40, they must […]
Nonfiction
POLICE, ADJECTIVE—SOME THOUGHTS by Joy Al-Sofi
Deconstruction, noun. Different meanings are discovered by taking apart the structure of the language used and exposing the underlying assumptions. – Collins English Dictionary Myth, noun. The second function of myth is to justify an existing social system and account for traditional rites and customs. – Robert Graves, “Introduction,” New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology Deconstruction began as […]
DOPE by Kelly Daniels
I met the sisters through a roommate referral service, two dark haired girls with round faces, smiling in the doorway of the apartment. Dora was a touch slimmer, and Stephanie had a hoop through an eyebrow. Otherwise, they looked alike. The apartment, or flat as they called it, was a hallway with rooms on either […]
THE TREE LOT by Shane E. Bondi
2am, we’re up on top of the green and white striped tent with zip ties, cans of Lone Star beer and a three-foot Christmas tree. It’s the night before Thanksgiving, a warm and breezy unlit hour in Austin, Texas. Below us, a 60- x 40-foot arena of Christmas trees, some stacked like cordwood, some on […]
STATEMENT BY THE ARTIST notes on life and work by Robert MacCready
My career began as a spoiled layabout in Greensboro, NC, surrounded by a jackpot of weirdoes, three of whom are now the editors who bring you Mayday Magazine. Upon arrival in Greensboro, I had made a handful of short films, the earliest dating back to an 8th grade short which re-enacted the Nat Turner Slave Rebellion […]
WILLIAM CARLOS WRITES EZRA POUND THE DAY AFTER HIROSHIMA by Kent Johnson
When the crazy tracers, the first time, went crazy-up over Baghdad, it was all so stunning (against the grainy green), and we were dying to giggle, and we did—just a bit of tittering. And then the buildings on video started exploding, it got sort of hard to keep from chortling. Astounding, shouted the naïve crowd […]
JOHNSON’S REPLY by Kent Johnson
Greetings to you over there, in the 5th or 7th arrondissement. You’d asked me some months back if I might wish to respond. I wrote you back, you’ll recall, and said I thought it best to let your review stand alone. But yesterday, the folks from MAYDAY wrote me and asked, as well, that I say something […]
A LETTER TO KENT JOHNSON by Nicholas Manning
Paris, 4th of October 2009 Dear Kent, I’ve decided to write this review of your book Homage to the Last Avant-Garde in the form of a letter to you, and this for several reasons. Firstly, it allows me to negate certain censorious aspects of normative critical discourse via recourse to the mode of tonally ambiguous epistolary, which […]
GNOMIC SAVIORS: EDITORS ON EDITING – HOW CAN LIT MAGS INCREASE READERSHIP?
Okla Elliott: Since one of my goals for doing this editors forum is to promote literary journals and hopefully garner subscriptions for the journals involved here and others, could you discuss what you think editors and writers could be doing to increase readership of literary journals? For example, one tactic I’ve used is to require workshop […]
GNOMIC SAVIORS: EDITORS ON EDITING – WHAT IS THE PLACE OF POLITICS IN LIT MAGS?
Okla Elliott: Since we’ve hit economics and corrective missions, it might be appropriate to talk about the place of politics in literature. It strikes me that American authors are so often unwilling to engage with anything political, whereas European, Latin American, and African authors do so almost constantly. I’ve even gotten the sense from many writers […]
