The International Literary Quarterly has just put its first issue online:
We strive to publish the best in contemporary literature while shunning all ideological affiliations. Indeed, the driving force behind The International Literary Quarterly is that it be a broad church in the world of letters, a forum for outstanding poetry and prose, whether in its original version or in translation, and for criticism that is trenchant and thought-provoking.
Issue 1 features recent work by three of Scotland’s leading authors (W.N. Herbert, Robert Alan Jamieson and Laura Marney); translations by Suzanne Jill Levine, who has also contributed some of her own work, and Thalia Pandiri; previously unpublished fiction by Lydia Davis, Gabriel Josipovici and Carol Novack; new poetry by George Szirtes; and an essay on the Italian author, Curzio Malaparte, by Daniel Gunn. All of these contributions are published alongside artwork by the review’s Art Editor, Calum Colvin, the distinguished Scottish artist.
It looks like a very worthy publication, and I greet it warmly. (Found, as so many good things are, at wood s lot.)
You can’t think something is outstanding unless you have an ideological affiliation or two!
Yeah, I wondered about “shunning all ideological affiliation”. Sounds like a code-phrase, but for what? What’s that dog-whistle I see but can’t quite hear? Perhaps simply aesthetic conservatism — clean realistic fiction, terza rima?
“a broad church in the world of letters, a forum for outstanding poetry and prose”
Isn’t that a bit much of a claim for a journal that starts out with:
“work by three of Scotland’s leading authors (W.N. Herbert, Robert Alan Jamieson and Laura Marney)
– presumably written in a tribal, savage, relict dialect of a decent, upstanding, real language – English ?