Kipen on literary journals

David Kipen, the San Francisco Chronicle book critic and KCRW commentator, takes a look at the growing scene of West Coast literary journals. He spends a lot of time with the new California issue of Zoetrope: All Story, which contains pieces from, among others, Susan Straight and Richard Matheson (a reprint of his 1971 story "Duel" that Steven Spielberg made into a movie). Of the new Los Angeles journals, Kipen writes:

The sleekest of them is called Swink, which is Winchester public school slang for labor, or toil. A note on the title page tells you this, though it doesn't say why that would make it a good name for a literary magazine. The cover of issue No. 1 features a half-legible, unattributed quote from Ishmael Reed over a stylized green treatment of a No. 1 train on the New York subway -- an odd choice, somehow, for a magazine that prides itself on being bicoastal. It smacks of homesickness. But once you get past all the snazzy design, it's a pretty sturdy little journal...

Black Clock also contains what may be the single greatest author interview I've ever read. It's a sit-down between the unclassifiable author of the novel "Dhalgren," Samuel R. Delany, and Black Clock editor Steve Erickson, who teaches at CalArts and wrote the truly spooky novel "Rubicon Beach." Somehow they manage to say something new about science fiction, Hemingway and God knows what all else, and nothing old or predictable about anything...

About the third new West Coast literary magazine, the Los Angeles Review, the less said the better. Not because it isn't excellent, which it is, but because I'm in it. But even if I weren't, maybe especially if I weren't, the Los Angeles Review would already be fatter than the other two, the highs higher, the lows lower, the writers newer, more multifarious and the whole venture long, long overdue. The L.A. Review is, in short, the sound of a young region's voice breaking...