THEBIGONEMAGAZINERELEASEPARTY Heavy Manners Library Los Angeles March 21, 2024
On a cool night in Echo Park, Heavy Manners Library was heating up. The small space, normally filled with books and artwork, was crammed with dozens of people; it felt like anyone I’d had a conversation with or noticed on Twitter over the last five years was in the building. Or, more likely, stranded outside, as the Library had reached capacity and late-coming lovers of alt-lit were relegated to the sidewalk, where they loitered, smoked, and waited for word from inside. I’d never seen such hype surrounding a magazine launch — but then, this was The Big One.
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K Hank Jost
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Mar 21, 2024 4:27 pm
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K Hank Jost Photo
Angel Food Magazine Launch Sisters Brooklyn, NYC March 20, 2024
Here we continue documentation of the early 2020s NYC literary magazine boom. I was genuinely excited for this one, the launch of Angel Food Magazine at Sisters. Something about the editor-in-chief’s and the magazine’s presence online gave me no small hope that this publication would be going for something different, not only in the styles it favors but also the editors’ method of conducting themselves. Tweets that blend the usual millennial quirk with an unwavering self-seriousness, a mission centered on the supremacy of good writing, a commitment to a left-wing politics, and a design sensibility toward the simplistic, all boded well and piqued my anticipation.
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K Hank Jost
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Mar 10, 2024 10:08 am
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Heavy Traffic Magazine Launch Mast Books East Village, NYC 3/8/2024
It behooves any artist of any stripe to move through their milieu with mind questing to understand. One may and should have their precious personal project, their vision which no general trend or contemporary taste stands to shake them from, but always an artist keen to make work for the world around them and yet to come must cultivate a base of knowledge concerning the environment they occupy. It is in this spirit that I continue to go to literary events in NYC. It this spirit which led to my being turned away at a Forever Mag party a week ago, and it is in this spirit yet again that my partner and I attended the launch event for Patric McGraw’s Heavy Traffic Magazine — another of the few glossy lit mags to have cropped up out of the downtown scene in the last few years.
Nine a.m. on an unseasonably sunny Saturday morning, a small line of sleepy people waiting for coffees from a van parked by overflowing trash bins. One conversation, between former coworkers from the “Institute of the Future,” was perky and optimistic, bike gear still on. Behind them a coworking space, gallery, community event center, Oakstop, filled with attendees and vendors, eager for the start of the first annual Plant Futures Fest.
One of the coffee seekers — after greeting what appeared to be coworkers — did have a clue, or at least an idea what to expect: “Some combination of useful information, inspiration, and business ideas,” he said, to which I can now add industry networking and mentorship funnel for students.
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Jamil Ragland
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Feb 9, 2024 9:00 am
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Moderator Leslie Mayes and the panelists of The Stories Behind the Big Stories of 2023.
The Stories Behind the Big Stories of 2023 Elmwood Community Center West Hartford Feb. 8, 2024
Until about two weeks ago, I didn’t consider myself a journalist. I’ve never even taken a journalism class, much less majored in it and learned all of the techniques and nuances that journalists have to deploy in their field. I was a writer who wrote opinions, which is not close to the same thing as journalism.
In the bowels of what feels like the coziest Manhattan bookstore not in Manhattan, I thumbed through the latest issue of Alta Journal as well-heeled types milled about with drinks in hand, made at a little bar that sits in the middle of the establishment. The recent rains having just soaked the city, Clio’s wood-paneled bookshelves and reading tables for one felt like a shrine to the East Bay literati. And it felt like the perfect East Coast-meets-West Coast sensibility for the launch of the journal’s latest issue on Baja, or what publisher Will Hearst calls “the lower California.”
Founded in 2017, Alta Journal is California’s answer to the New York Review of Books or The Paris Review —West Village sensibility baked under the eternal sunshine of the Left Coast. So it’s no wonder that literary explorers like Joan Didion and Dave Eggers have been profiled within its pages, but with large-scale, glossy photo essays and one-page features on topics like celebrity tequilas.
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Karen Ponzio
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Nov 13, 2023 10:39 am
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Tiny Ghosts Haunting Small Things, The Band Plays in Front of a Big Audience, and Cars Go Too Fast (and our road design encourages it) are not titles you might find on the bestseller list or at your local news stand. But you can find them in the zine library making its way through the city as part of the New Haven Zine Scene, a group of creatives that meet up once a month to make, read, and talk about zines and share everything and anything zine related. This past Saturday, the group met for the first time at Possible Futures on Edgewood Avenue, where it will continue to trade off monthly meeting dates with Witch Bitch Black Box on Whitney.
