Visiting Borders in Glasgow recently, I was pleased to see their previous policy of cutting back on small press magazines has been, for now, reversed. A number of old and new international magazines are available, including Tin House (highly recommended), The Harvard Review, Ambit, Cutting Teeth, Banipal, Wasafari, Poetry Wales, and new magazines Dreams That Money Can Buy, and Tales. There were other publications too.

BANIPAL is a glossy Arabic journal published in English. It contains fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Cutting Teeth is a Glasgow-based magazine focused on short stories and poetry. Tales is a new UK mag that focuses on fairy tales in a kind of modern, hip way. It’s an extremely colourful mag, with loads of glossy photos and illustrations. Harvard Review features another dark story by Joyce Carol Oates centred around a missing girl.

The summer edition of TIN HOUSE has a beautiful cover. According to the editorial, some other magazines are cutting back on fiction and “devoting more pages to attack-dog book reviews”.But Tin House continues to feature fine stories. There’s also poetry, an essay on Malcolm Lowry’s novel ‘Under The Volcano’, a piece on Dodie Smith and her novel, ‘I Capture The Castle’. Something else worth checking out are the review/articles on Mavis Gallant’s ‘The Collected Stories’ and Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod’s short story collection ‘The Lost Salt Gift of Blood’. Tin House has much else to interest those who like high quality literary journals.

Another interesting publication is THE PURPLE JOURNAL, a French magazine based in Paris. Available in both original French and translated English language editions, this publication contains: “Essays, stories, reports, portraits, chronicles, photographs”. Much of the work appearing in this magazine is written in present tense. There’s a focus on the world here and now, on reality, and on the tiniest details of that reality. Sometimes the writing is like a diary entry, other times it’s somewhat closer to journalism or essay. Israeli actress Maya Maron appears on the cover. The first piece of prose, ‘May Journal’ is actually a series of diary-type snapshots of people in a street, restaurant, or other everyday scene, set in locations from Sopot, Kadyny or Warsaw in Poland, to Paris, Toulouse, Marseilles and other French places. ‘Opium is the Opium of the People’ is a fascinating piece on a drug or herb called Khat, which is chewed in Djibouti, where it has a devastating effect on the population. Other prose pieces come from Tel Aviv, Belgrade, Kuala Lumpur, Paris, Japan, and elsewhere. The black and white photography in this magazine is one of its strengths. Anyone interested in The Purple Journal can subscribe through the magazine’s website.

On the subject of photography itself, Scottish-based PORTFOLIO wins hands down. A beautifully produced magazine that is really more like a book. Unlike most other art and design magazines, the images and text are not constantly interrupted by ads. Issue 41 features fantastic work from Seung Woo Back, Martin Pover, Neeta Madahar and Melanie Manchot. Madahar’s photographs are reminiscent of Chinese wallpaper. Manchot’s Moscow Portraits features Moscow girls and groups of people standing against urban landscapes. Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami gives us the sparsely beautiful photographic series, ‘Trees in Snowy Landscapes’. Gayle Chong Kwan’s photographs, meanwhile, offer fantastic landscapes made from food, in ‘Cockaigne’. Hyung-Geun Park’s ‘Untitled 2003-4’ offers photographs of scattered clothes in a wood, amongst other things. There’s a wonderful use of colour in this sequence. Willie Doherty’s ‘Non-Specific Threat’ challenges our ideas about hard-looking men and Northern Ireland.

Other visual mags worth checking out include: Gomma, American Art Review, 8, Next Level, Aperture, Afterall.

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.