In looking through the current Table of Contents and reading once again what is, if I may say, quite a remarkable collection of stories, poems, and essays, I’m struck by how long it has been since I actually made these selections. My fresh delight in discovering old friends—Eamon Grennan or Grace Schulman, for example—and exciting new voices—Asali Solomon and Zsófia Bán, not to mention the winner and runners-up of the KR Short Fiction Contest—almost matches that initial instance of twelve months ago or so. Given the care of our production process, the back-and-forth of copyediting and queries, a year is about right.
After all, one of the defining traits of The Kenyon Review has always been its polish: magical covers, the painstaking copyediting mentioned above, the care with which individual pieces are mixed and matched. (Typically, we are shuffling the contents of two or three or even four issues at a time, inserting a story here, switching a poem that-aways, always seeking an elusive balance of many elements.) Surely the physical, tactile, thinginess of this artifact, this journal, has been part of its allure. Yet as more and more of our readers enjoy The Review via the Amazon Kindle or other electronic devices, it will be interesting to consider how that affects the equation.
Already have an account? Log in
Join KR for even more to read.
