We’ve talked a lot lately about the fate of the book and the prospects for publishing literature in electronic media, but that issue has suddenly become real for us at The Kenyon Review. Today, we launch KR Online, an online literary journal that we intend to complement the traditional magazine and reach out to new readers. Our first issue features poetry by Vona Groarke, Shai Dotan, and Nick Courtright, fiction by Eric Vrooman and Kelly Ga-Lei Gilbert, an essay by Kevin Stein on the fate of paper manuscripts and drafts in the digital age, and Jessica Johnson’s review of Richard Kenney’s The One Strand River: Poems, 1994-2007. Take a look! We’ll add new work every few weeks, and over time we’ll collect the pieces we’ve published into electronic issues that you’ll find through links on the main KRO page.
We won’t stop publishing the magazine, but we’ve come to realize that there are things we can do online that are impossible in print. For one thing, we can publish more of the amazing writing we receive, in a more timely way, and make it available free to readers around the world. In recent years, the ever-growing volume of submissions we’ve received at the magazine has meant that we can take only a small percentage of the writing we admire, and the time between acceptance of a submission and publication has grown to almost two years. KR Online will allow us to double the amount of terrific fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews we can publish, and we’ll be able to get it to you more quickly.
What won’t change are our editorial standards or the production values we bring to the magazine. The literature we publish in KR Online may be a little edgier, a little more experimental, and certainly more timely, but everything we publish will be held to the same high standards and expectations as The Kenyon Review.
If you’re not a KR subscriber, you’ll now be able to be a KR Online reader as easily as checking any online news or gossip site. We want to make great writing available to everyone who feels its call. That’s one thing that online literary magazines can do, but like everything else on the web, you have to know where to look to find quality. We’ve spent a lot of time over the last year looking at the growing number of online literary magazines, and there are a lot of terrific ones out there. In fact, sometimes it seems like there are more magazines than readers. What KR Online offers is our guarantee of the same high editorial and production standards that we’ve brought to The Kenyon Review since 1939. Over the years, we’ve published early works by generations of important writers, including Robert Penn Warren, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Flannery O’Connor, Boris Pasternak, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Taylor, Dylan Thomas, Anthony Hecht, Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, Derek Walcott, Woody Allen, Louise Erdrich, William Empson, Linda Gregg, Mark Van Doren, Kenneth Burke, and Ha Jin. Short stories published in KR have won more O. Henry Awards than any other literary journal, and many poems that first appeared in the magazine have become modern classics. Now you can find the next generation of great writers at KR Online.
We’ll also be publishing regular reviews of new books, as well as thoughtful essays on more established writers. As reviews vanish from print publications, online literary journals will become the serious reader’s source for reviews of the latest fiction and poetry. We’ll be able to offer commentary on the books that are important right now, bringing them to the attention of readers around the world.
So take a look. Tell us what you think! We’ll be listening, making changes and improvements over time. Come back and visit us regularly, and we think you’ll find that KR Online will become an important part of your literary world.