Revised and expanded: FFM: US newsstand eclectic fiction magazines, from the 1970s till now: FICTION (and FICTION), SHORT STORY INTERNATIONAL, STORY, ZOETROPE ALL-STORY, ARGOSY (and ARGOSY), McSWEENEY'S et al.

March-April 1963

The two Fictions...which began about the same time..

As the 1960s rolled into the 1970s, certain popular artforms refused to die, no matter how tenuous their audiences and customer-base might become, at least in the US. For example, radio drama--while the audience for audio drama had never diminished too much in the UK or Canada (the CBC was particularly noteworthy for doing consistently interesting work), between the efforts of CBS, NPR, Pacifica and such independent but widely-heard producers as ZBS, there were more hours of new nationally-available radio drama in this country in 1977-79, for example, than had been available since the turn of the 1950s.  So also, a few diehards were always willing to try to launch new eclectic fiction magazines that were largely dependent on newsstand sales and subscriptions, as opposed to the small-press and university-press models of most "little" magazines over the decades, even as most larger newsstand magazines were giving up or drastically reducing their fiction content (Curtis Publications selling The Ladies Home Journal and, even more, shutting down The Saturday Evening Post, soon revived as a nostalgic shadow of its previous existence, were among the most telling blows.) However, even Adventure magazine, once one of the most literate and elite of the pulp magazines (published by the

March, 1957

dress-pattern concern Butterick--for he-man cred, and its reader-service organization apparently the beginning of the American Legion), but by the '60s just another of the less degraded "men's true adventure" magazines, returned for its last issues at the turn of the 1970s to an all-fiction format. Before the Adventure recursion, the Whit Burnett/Martha Foley-founded Story magazine had lingered till 1967, and the several years-worth of Short Story International newsstands saw in the mid-'60s had ended the previous year. Short Stories had folded in 1959 as Short Stories for Men (for its last few issues, as it had added "true men's adventure" articles, and as a stablemate of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine), after almost seventy years (among the more notable contributions to the last issue were a reprint of Theodore Sturgeon's "Fluffy" and a new and still unreprinted piece by Elmore Leonard)(it might also be noted that Short Stories, as a repository of manly adventure fiction for the most part, had been edited by two women nearly in succession for most of its last quarter-century, Dorothy McIlwraith while she was also editing Weird Tales and Cylvia Kleinman, Leo Margulies's wife and business partner).  By the end of the 1950s, attempts by Ziff-Davis and the newly-formed David Publications to launch such eclectic if adventure-oriented titles as Tales of the Sea and Jack London's Adventure Magazine were quick failures. Original anthologies of short fiction and magazines in paperback form, such as New World Writing and New Directions continued into the '60s, and were joined by New American Review, which in its turn inspired several imitators, even if some, such as Works In Progress, seemed more like loss-leader advertisements than attempts at freestanding series.

front and back, May 1965; note "A Telstar in Print"

The Avenue Victor Hugo Bookstore in Boston was one of the first to put its hand in with a new newsstand magazine in the 1970s, beginning to produce Fiction: A Magazine of Storytelling in 1973 (though I might be mistaken here, since I can't find anything online to back up my impression of the first issue date)...despite the fact that the City College (later University) of New York had already begun producing their magazine Fiction in 1972. (And, fwiw, CCNY's Fiction really was devoted exclusively to fiction, rather than adding in poetry and other literary art, as the other magazine did.) The Ave VH Fiction eventually produced nine highly regarded issues published at irregular intervals through 1976, about which time the bookstore tried another gambit, and began publishing Galileo: Science Fact and Fiction, slightly hardier, and generally well-respected, but also facing the same sort of distribution problems that Fiction suffered.  (CUNY continues to publish their Fiction.)

A 1978 issue of the revival, just before briefly
re-introducing cover illustration for newsstands...

Short Story International was a revival, as noted above, of a title which had flourished for several years in the mid 1960s, only with better paper and a relatively high single-issue pricetag, beginning in 1977. Samuel Tankel had been publisher and editor of the 1960s version, with assistance from Francesca van der Ling; Sylvia Tankel was editor of the revival, which as had the previous version reprinted stories from various languages, usually in translation (but with no lack of stories originally published in English, from such places and countries as Gibraltar and India as well as usually a story or two from the UK and the US)...the newsstand presence was relatively brief, running only into the early '80s, but the magazine continued into the late 1990s (at least), on more of a traditional little magazine model. 

Autumn 1999

Story had been revived in 1989, for what would eventually be an 11-year run, for most of that as a stablemate of Writer's Digest.  The revival tended to publish one reprint from the old Story per issue, and certainly met with critical approval, but while it consistently won National Magazine Awards for fiction (an award ballot that aspirants essentially have to buy their way onto), and published some notable fiction as well as being more widely-visible than nearly any other fiction title during its run, it was still not the magazine the original had been, in liveliness nor importance. While such important and venerable little magazines as The Paris Review and Partisan Review had some newsstand representation in those years, they were not as frequently nor widely seen as Story; only another start-up, beginning in 1990, Glimmer Train, the pet project of sisters who were, indeed, heirs of a railroad patent fortune, was nearly as well-distributed...while also having a bit of a bland, dull feel to it, despite a worthy continuing feature detailing writers repressed by governments around the world. Also notable on at least some newsstands, increasingly so in the last decade, the revival (beginning in 1979) of the British magazine Granta, which like a number of US little magazines has pursued a strategy of both magazine and book distribution simultaneously...Granta is almost unique,

as well, in being a foreign fiction title to get much distribution in the US. (And an interesting project, though not a newsstand magazine, was attempted briefly in 1990, a series of magazines called Special Report: ____, where the blank would be filled by a number of different topics or forms of lit; these magazines were meant to be available in waiting rooms of doctors and anyone else where waiting was protracted. Special Report: Fiction in its few issues offered at least Francine Prose's "Dog Stories," collected in the 1991 Best American Short Stories (I browsed one issue in an office, once, but don't remember the content well). Similarly interesting and almost as abortive, if a bit hardier, was the attempt by small-press Pulphouse Publishing in 1991 to produce a Pulphouse Weekly fiction magazine...the attempt at weekly publication was soon dropped, and the slim largely newsprint magazine was published irregularly for several years, mildly eclectic and somewhat moreso than the fatter hardcover issues of Pulphouse of earlier years and continuing simultaneously.)

Argosy had been the original pulp magazine, inexpensively printed on cheap "pulp" paper (rather like blotter paper, if you can remember desk blotters) so as to make it very economical to charge very little compared to magazines on better paper...and Argosy had become one of the best-selling magazines of the first half of the 20th Century, featuring a mix of adventure and other sorts of fiction, from a wide array of writers, not least at that time their "discovery" Edgar Rice Burroughs (though Tarzan was introduced in Argosy's sibling magazine All-Story). By the 1970s, Argosy had become a decreasingly profitable men's magazine, a down-market variation on Esquire with a few elements of Men's Sweat magazines thrown in (and not a little right-wing berserkery, in its first revival after briefly folding), but enthusiasts for the eclectic, important Argosy of the fiction-publishing years were twice able to produce a few issues of their vision of what a revived Argosy should look like.

The 1990s revival

The 2004 revival.

The 1990s revival attempted to touch mostly on the adventure-story tradition of Argosy, and saw most of its distribution through comics stores (where it saw some resistance, sadly, since it carried only some comics/graphic stories). The later revival was somewhat more literarily ambitious, and certainly was a more elaborate physical specimen; taking a cue from McSweeney's (of which more below), it offered its several issues in slipcases, with more than one bound object within. Alas, neither project had sufficient funding for more than a few scattered issues.

Argosy's stablemate (and occasional merger partner) All-Story was revived as a title by Francis Ford Coppola and associates in 1997 as Zoetrope All-Story, and as a project launched by largely film money was unsurprisingly not only more worried about appearances than nearly every other fiction magazine has been so far (every issue has a different "guest designer") but also tends in each issue to have at least one reprint that was the basis of or related to an important film, including reprints from the likes of Robert Bloch and Philip K. Dick (for a 2000 issue, they also reprinted the first Tarzan cover from the original All-Story). Sadly, though ZA-S has essentially taken over the National Magazine Awards fiction slot vacated by Story, such industry appreciation seems to have hastened rather than slowed the magazine's slide into ever more slightness and notional work, even when talented people are involved. 

Even more protean in its appearance, often taking any number of whimsical forms for one issue or another, and sadly even more prone to slight and notional content, is McSweeney's, originally and still officially Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, beginning in 1998 as the first of many projects since tucked under its rubric, or allied with it, by Dave Eggers, the author of a precious and highly popular memoir of taking care of his younger brother, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, itself by title alone indicative of Eggers's tendency toward the desire to do (genuinely) good work (often in the sense of charitable, though he clearly strives artistically) in various directions and to simultaneously congratulate himself for doing so in the most smugly adorable manner. 

Eggers has been pouring his money into McSweeney's and the rather more conventionally-shaped nonfiction companion magazine The Believer and the video "magazine" Wholphin, and the first two seem to have found something of an audience, and any given issue is likely to have genuinely good work by the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Lethem or a Robert Coover cheek by jowl with some frippery by an Eggers favorite.  Michael Chabon has produced two notable anthologies that have been issued apparently not so much as issues as supplements to the magazine (they are rather better than the magazine as reading experiences, as well); Eggers himself edits an annual, Best American Non-Required Reading, with kids from the literacy project he helped found. As they put it themselves on the McSweeney's site: Each issue of the quarterly is completely redesigned. There have been hardcovers and paperbacks, an issue with two spines, an issue with a magnetic binding, an issue that looked like a bundle of junk mail, and an issue that looked like a sweaty human head. 

Basically, at this point, a number of little magazines are selling about as well as the traditional newsstand fiction magazines, and all can often only be found at only the best newsstands one can find...so such latter-day little magazines as Tin House are on an essentially equal footing with Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Paris Review or other latter-day arrivals as World Literature Today, a somewhat slicker and less fiction-heavy heir to Short Story International...and one can do worse than to pick up a copy of such fine eclectic magazines as Boulevard or Conjunctions or Black Clock when you see them, or watch the progress of The American Reader, striving to be the Next Big Thing (and announced, in a gush of excessive ambition, as a monthly).

For more of today's books (and perhaps a few more magazines or stories from them) please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Images mostly from Galactic Central.