Better Than Books: Or, How I Learned to Stop Fronting and Love the Magazine

illustration by Justin Wambult-Reynolds

As we push side by side through a swinging bookstore door and out onto the sidewalk, I turn to my friend Tessa and say, “What if I like magazines more than books?”

She smiles, less surprised by my question than I am, and waits for me to go on.

“I mean, really,” I insist.

For someone who has long seen herself as bookish, this borders on a frightening bit of self-discovery. But it’s time to reckon with it. We’ve just spent 40 minutes in a bookstore, and while my unimpeachably bookish friend thumbed through novels and histories and things, I holed up in the periodicals area and finally landed at the checkout counter with new issues of KS, Punk Planet, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and LTTR. Not a book in the bunch.

My sheepish wondering aloud is not a casual what-if-this-were-true what-if. It’s a serious question about identity, a what-would-it-mean-if-this-were-true what-if. “I mean, really,” I’ve just said to my friend, almost begging for a reassuring eye-glint. (I mean, really, will you still love me if it turns out I’m not a bookish character but a magaziney one? I mean, who will I be if that’s true? I mean, once—this was years ago—when I was temping at this book-packaging place, I shared a lunch break with two other writers who were temping there too and we talked about the kind of writing we “really” do—as opposed to the clearly not-real writing we were doing for pay that day. I said “fiction and essays” and one of them said she was a screenwriter and the other said she did “magazine writing” and I thought, no question in my mind, clearly the kind of writing I do is even more real real writing than whatever glossy toss-away-able things this girl’s up to. I mean…)

Tessa laughs.

She—who receives e-mails from me all day long most days, many of them referring to a piece I’m editing or writing for such-and-such magazine or this article she has to read in this other one, and who has just hours ago been in my room, where there are strewn books I’ve started and stalled out on (telltale bookmarks only a few chapters into way too many of them) and rows of containers overflowing with well-thumbed magazines—knows very well that this question has been long in coming. Most of my reading and writing these days is in magazines, and the truth is, I love them.

By the time we’ve turned the corner, I’m reeling off all the reasons magazines may just—really, truly—be better than books: freshness of content, multiplicity of voices, tightness of language that comes from cutting and cutting word count (rather than padding it with repetition and unnecessary sprawl, as so many new books do1), the ability to publish content more radical than a book publisher might be able to afford to…

“Actually, yeah,” I announce as we turn another corner, “magazines are totally better than books.”2

To All the Mag Pieces I’ve Loved Before
Obviously, new periodicals can’t be compared to classic texts, but in terms of contemporary short-form journalism and creative writing, magazines surpass books hands down. After all, most of the content of new short-story collections and trade nonfiction books first appeared (often in tighter and/or fascinatingly rougher form) in magazines.

Who wants to read it two years later, after some publishing house’s dysfunctional team of editors and marketing people have made a million and three differently motivated changes and added three half-baked stories just to fill the thing out? And screw hundreds of insular pages by a single author when you could read that writer’s voice in conversation with lots of others’ in a magazine.

Beyond their ability to be multivoiced, many magazines are also multifarious. My favorites (one of which you are holding) shrug off conventional mainstream-mag wisdom, which dictates that a magazine must have a particular niche, and embrace hybridization and cross-pollination, letting creative and critical works in various genres coexist, putting visual arts, politics, music and other often typically segregated content together.

And, of course, a magazine can devote a few pages to content that a publisher could never support at book length, content that’s too radical politically or formally to guarantee even a small press sufficient return on a full-book investment. Periodicals—especially independent ones sustained by their readers more than by advertising or large institutional dollars—are forums for the most lithe culture producers and critics. The most exciting (and, in some cases, mind-/life-changing) work I’ve read in recent years has been on periodicals’ pages.

For instance: Evan Harris’ short stories. They’re clean and sad and strange; they nudge their way across supposed boundaries (both formal and emotional) in a way that feels inevitable, honest and necessary. I first encountered Harris’s work unexpectedly in the fall 1998 issue of the (now-defunct) journal Story. I immediately went looking for a collection, but none existed.3 Thank goodness that in the last few years, I’ve been delighted, again and again, to crackor click on a journal I’ve just pulled from my mailbox or Internet bookmarks folder and discover a new Evan Harris story in the TOC (Fence, Spring/Summer 2000;City, Winter 2002/2003; The Brooklyn Rail, April 2004).

And the roundtable discussion about the aftermath of Katrina among New Orleans-based community organizers that Color Lines ran in Winter 2005/2006.

And the special edition of Clamor that was passed out at the 2004 RNC protests. (Who could slide a bulky book into the hands and backpacks of thousands of peripatetic activists in one weekend?)

There’s more: Reading Dean Spade’s essay “Greed” at makezine.org provoked a several-years-running commitment to consciously trying to apply anti-poverty politics to every money-related move I make. A short personal essay Doris Lessing wrote about a chair that had been re-upholstered, layer after layer, for generations as it passed from unrelated household to household (published in Granta’s summer 2005 issue and reprinted in the Harper’s Readings section shortly thereafter) made palpable, in very few pages, the deep and layered values of reuse, DIY domesticity, history, thrift and the interconnectedness of so-called strangers’ private interiors.

I’ve been thrilled to read magazine content for years, spending far more reading hours with short scattered pieces than with new books, yet I still feel a little sheepish about identifying as more magaziney than bookish. There are personal reasons for this (growing up as an anomalous poor kid in gifted classes full of wealthy, “cultured” children, I developed an early habit of trying to high-class pass, and despite allof my anti-hierarchical politics, this habit still hasn’t quite been rubbed out). But now that I’ve committed to type a slew of arguments in favor of mag-love, I have to wonder what the lingering lit-world ideal of bookishness is about.

Like most manifestations of cultural elitism, the concept that books are “high-brow,” and thus superior to periodicals, is mostly a means of shoring up oppressive norms. To consider books categorically superior to magazines is in part to believe in the notion of legitimacy—well, it’s nice that his little pieces have been printed in lit mags, but he’ll be a legit writer when he gets a book deal. Of course, in capitalist consumer cultures like this one, “legitimate” mostly means “marketable,” which is hardly a literary designation. And to categorically privilege single-author works over many-voiced ones is to uphold dominant values of individualism and the lone master creator. I could go on… And so I realize: My sheepishness about identifying as less bookish than magaziney is only upholding values I don’t believe in. For the sake of the community, it’s time to come out and let the world know how I really love.

1 I copyedit lots of trade nonfiction books, which means I’m paid to read them more closely and more critically than almost anyone. And I am confident in saying that there is no good reason for most of them to be anywhere near as long as they are other than to make book buyers feel like they’re dropping 20-plus bucks on something substantive—when, of course, what they’re getting is weight and size and redundancy, not substance at all.
2 And actually, yeah, I totally grew up in the San Fernando Valley.
3 While her fiction has not been published in book form, Harris is the author of one nonfiction book called The Quit, which I haven’t read but which, Amazon.com tells me, posits that “quitting can be the best decision you’ll ever make.” (While we’re on the subject of embracing things we might feel ashamed of…)

Jessica now identifies as an indie-mag slut. In addition to writing for Kitchen Sink, she’s currently editing Clamor’s People section and serving as a contributing editor at LOUDmouth. She’s also been caught between the pages of Watchword, Bitch, elimae, and a handful of other pubs she loves so much she couldn’t imagine having to choose between them.