Preparing for the Park

The launch is almost upon us, and all of our efforts are being directed to the production of our first issue and our approaching launch event. The issue has had a great response and is filling up with reviews, interviews, and excerpts. Here are a few updates on the production of the Luna Park website, our coming January 31st launch party/fiasco in Brooklyn, NY, and some extraneous comments on and reviews of the lit mag world that we couldn't fit in on the regular blog posts here over the past month:

• Website production is running according to schedule. Submissions of reviews, essays, interviews, or excerpts (from editors) for Luna Park issue one are due January 10th. The first issue will be released January 31st at lunaparkreview.com. (This will be roughly the same ongoing quarterly schedule: pieces due the 10th of Jan./Apr./Jul./Oct, and issues will come out at the end of these same months.)
  
• Tao Lin has been added to the list of readers for the Luna Park website launch party this coming January 31st at Noo Na in Brooklyn, NY. Tao Lin is the author of the books Eeeee Eee Eeee and Bed, and also has a book of poems to be published in early 2008. Tao also has the blog, Reader of Depressing Books. We are excited to have him on board. (We are under the assumption that he will be reading from his upcoming book of poetry, but are prepared to be surprised.)
• Juked magazine has also come on board for the launch event. (Also look for Juked editor John Wang at the AWP book fair; he will be sharing a table with Hobart.)
• As most know, the Chicago Review has published in their recent issue (vol. 53 no. 2/3) one of the more controversial pieces in the literary magazine world in recent years, Juliana Saphr and Stephanie Young's "Numbers Trouble," an essay on the amount of female poetry published in United States' magazines and anthologies. The essay is in response to Jennifer Ashton's article "Our Bodies, Our Poems," from a recent issue of American Literary History [here is an early draft of the piece]. Ashton responds in the issue of Chicago Review to Saphr and Young's rebuttal with her essay "The Numbers Trouble with 'Numbers Trouble.'" And at the end of the issue, the magazine's editors, Robert Baird and Joshua Kotin, provide two charts illuminating the ratio of male versus female poetry recently published in literary magazines. Because of the attention these pieces attracted in the blogosphere and elsewhere, Chicago Review has made all the previously mentioned pieces available in full for free on their website. In November and early December, Poetry Foundation published numerous posts in response to the Chicago Review pieces on their blog, harriet.
• A refreshingly new literary anthology, Best American Fantasy 2007, released their first book in mid 2007. Michael Chabon is quoted as calling this first book in the series, "A cabinet of dark wonders, and an important--no, a crucial--map of the richness and strangeness and startling range of the modern American short story." Rather than merely a science fiction or fantasy compilation, the anthology instead includes some of the best and most magically mysterious stories published in magazines online and off, such as from A Public Space, Oxford American, ParaSpheres, Pindelyboz--even The New Yorker. The overall series is edited by fiction writer Matthew Cheney (here's his blog), and guest editors are Ann and Jeff VanderMeer--both highly acclaimed fantasy authors. The 2007 volume includes exciting stories from writers working on the frontiers of the imagination: Kelly Link, Peter LaSalle, Daniel Alarcon, Brian Evenson, Kevin Brockmeier, Chris Adrian, and many others. Quite easily the most electric best of anthology to come out since Eggers' Best Nonrequired series was launched in 2002. Cheney's Best American Fantasy is a more than welcome addition to an often safe and conservative Best of series from Houghton Mifflin (Cheney's series is published by Prime Books). Cheney and editors are looking for submissions from magazines for their 2008 volume--click here for details.