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The newest issue of Mississippi Review (42.3), besides having a pretty swank cover image, is The Novella Issue, featuring works by only four authors: Katie Chase (46pp), Kevin A. Gonzalez (62pp), Jaimy Gordon (28pp), and Paola Peroni (25pp). Rare to see this kind of page dedication to the long form in an entire issue, making this a great collection for the long read.

New England Review editor, Carolyn Kuebler, introduces the publication’s new poetry editor, Rick Barot, in her Editor’s Note (v35.4). Not new to the publication, Barot was published in its pages in the past, then became a submissions reader. Kuebler writes that Barot “has a penchant for asking the hard questions, the big questions: What is NER for? What is our role in current events and conversations? What makes a piece of writing last beyond its immediate publication date? Must it, will it, should it? Why is so much of what we select so dark?” He turns these questions into conversation, and Kuebler shares what he comes to when considering works for the pages of NER. The Editor’s Note can be read in full here.

The newest issue of Indiana Review includes a special folio, “Understanding Readiness,” which is “meant to present diverse explorations and meditations on the impact of the writing, the figure, and political influence of Amiri Baraka” Poetry Editor Nandi Comer and Editor Britt Ashley write, “The voices in this section share Baraka’s aesthetic bravery – one that grabs its audience, demanding we listen to issues concerning contemporary American life. It also must be noted that the diversity in aesthetic and background of these writers speaks to the span of Baraka’s reach.”

Writers contributing to this folio: francine j. harris, Patricia Smith, Roger Reeves, Tarfiah Faizullah, Toi Derricotte, Matthew Shenoda, and avery r. young. Included with the written works are Amiri Baraka’s original drawings curated from Indiana University’s Lily Library.

Volume 3 of Conium Review is one of the most unique collectible editions of a literary magazine I’ve seen to date. “This is a book for book lovers,” say the editors. The “container” is a hand-stamped wooden box, conditioned with linseed, mineral, and orange oils. Inside are eight new stories from Olivia Ciacci, Tom Howard, D. V. Klenak, Jan LaPerle, Zach Powers, Christine Texeira, and Meeah Williams. Each individual micro-chapbook, broadside, and booklet is printed on unique paper, including parchment, linen, and recylced stock. This volume is also available in the standard perfect bound book form for non-collectors simply looking for good reading. Both can be ordered from the publication’s website.

I recommend reading World Literature Today cover-to-cover every issue, but if you need some extra incentive for the January-February 2015, here you go:

1. The article by J. Madison Davis: “The Idiotically Criminal Universe of the Brothers Cohen.”

2. The special section of flash nonfiction featuring works by Brian Doyle, Josey Foo, Lia Purpura, Vikram Kapur, and Dmitry Samarov.

3. The “Suite of Contempory Ethiopean Poetry” with Misrak Terefe, Abebaw Melaku, Mihret Kebede, Eric Ellingsen, and David Shook.

And my two runner-ups: “Storytelling, Fake Worlds, and the Internet” by Elif Shafak and “Ping-Pong: or, Writing Together” by Sergio Pitol. And everything else in between. But I did say I would pick three to number.

New Letters Editor Robert Stewart asks “Does art do much good?”

In his Editor’s Note, “Making What Matters,” Stewart shares, “In my home city recently, a 10-year-old girl named Machole and a 6-year-old girl named Angel, in separate events, were shot dead by gunfire. Machole was in her own living room when someone in a car shot several times into her house; Angel was walking out the door of a convenience store with her father. Other children continue to suffer abuse and violence, yes, but these two events, nine days apart, have caused many people here to examine the kind of landscape—city and country—we have shaped for our children.”

Go to the National Art Education Association News page on any given day, and you’ll see comment after comment from leaders across the nation proclaiming the importance of the arts in education, of turning and keeping the A in STEM for STEAM. It’s not a new struggle among cultures, among communiites, as Stewart notes the Trappist monk Thomas Merton “in a 1962 letter, where he confessed to being disheartened by evil in the world, despite his own writings and art. ‘Tell me,’ Merton wrote to his friend, “am I wasting my time?'”

It’s a question and concern that pervades and surfaces, resurfaces, confronts and confounds wirters, artists, educators, politician and policy makers. While Stewart answers the question in his commentary, an answer found through reading the works of authors in the journal and concluding on the worth and value of their efforts. A worth and value we need to retain and remind others of every chance we get.

In addition to the cover image, the Winter 2014 issue of The Georgia Review features what Editor Stephen Corey rightly refers to as “the striking art portfolio by Mequitta Ahuja” and notes this is the publication’s “second-ever multi-panel foldout.” This is both a generous and gorgeous dedication to artwork for journal readers to enjoy. Corey also footnotes the artwork introduction with this: “Mequitta Ahuja’s Automythography marks The Georgia Review‘s first collaborative project with the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art Galleries. Sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, Ahuja will be in residence at the school from late January to early February 2015, and an exhibit of her work will be on display at the Dodd Galleries.”

Nerve Lantern: Axon of Performance Literature is a truly unique publication. Published by Pyriform Press and edited by Ellen Redbird, Nerve Lantern is “a journal of experimental performance texts and texts about performance, supporting a range of forms, including poets’ theatre and page-as-stage.” Some examples from Winter 2014 Issue 7: “Un/Conventional Chorus: A Spoken Choral Work for Ten Voices” by Mary Burger & Yedda Morrison; “A Song about the Moon in the Middle of the Night” by Hannah Rodabaugh; “Xylene Radiator Anxiety Mask: Experimental Sonnet Map for Five Voices” by Gary Sloboda; “Pig of Angels of the Americlypse: An anti-masque for four players” by Rodrigo Toscano.

Submissions for the publication are open, but the editorial advice is to understand why you want to be a part of the Nerve Lantern community and what you feel “akin” to or what “new” you will add to it before submitting. The community can be better understood not just by reading past issues of the publication, but viewing one of the many performance videos shot during the publication’s performance venue: “An Afternoon of Sparking Poetry.” The most recent of these have been hosted by the Medicine Show Theatre in New York.

Redbird offers further “Thoughts to Nerve Lantern Newcomers” on the submissions page, asking questions to have writers consider the performance aspects of their work, not only how it might be performed “on stage” but also on the page. A helpful guide for readers and writers alike to help in our understanding and appreciation for this literary form.

Kudos to Ellen Redbird and contributors to Nerve Lantern for providing, not just a place for this genre, but a community in which it can be fostered.

Modern short fiction highlights the newest issue of Chinese Literature Today (v4 n2). Four award-winning authors were selected to exemplify what editors note is a revival of the short form in Chinese literature: Ai Wei, Fan Xiaoqing, Dong Xi, and Li Shijiang. “Our selection covers different generations of contemporary Chinese writers, both male and female writers, and a wide spectrum of literary styles. The selected stories are some of the most representative pieces that showcase short fiction’s efficacy in re-narrating history and memory, capturing immediate social changes, and aestheticizing fragmented individual experiences.”

Mediterraneans is the subject of The Massachusetts Review special issue for Winter 2014. In their introduction, Editors Anna Botta and Michel Moushabeck write of history of the area, of the many cultures that crisscrossed this busy commerce route, and of the language developed to be shared among them, called lingua franca.

“Another name for this Mediterranean vernacular was sabir,” say Botta and Moushabeck, “a noun that derives from the Latin root sapere, ‘to know.’ This special issue brings into conversation the different dialects, languages, vernaculars of the Mediterranean in order to create a sabir of poetic, fictive, and artistic imagination displaying the plurality of Mediterranean identities. The texts included in the pages that follow do not pretend ‘to know’ the Med, instead they trace the filigree of a sabir which can tell us only indirectly and vaguely what Mediterranean identity is.”

The full text of the introduction can be read on the TMR website along with several works from the issue.

Natural Bridge Fall 2014 (#32) includes a special selection of veterans-themed poetry and fiction. Guest Editor John Dalton writes that though the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are said to be ending, “These wars, it turns out, have their own afterlife. Perhaps no one understand this better than the men and women who’ve returned to us as veterans.”

Dalton hopes that this feature will help others better understand the “strangeness” in the role of military service: “to be asked to travel across the world and fight and kill and die in a culture you only partially understand, and perhaps a stranger thing to come home and figure out who you are and just what your service has meant.” It is a conundrum with which we all continue to struggle, and for which we continue to turn to writing to help us navigate as individuals and as a society.

Writers featured for this selection: Marilyn Johnston, Wendy Dunmeyer, John Twobey, Jack Vian, Ty Burson, Nandini Dhar, and Arthur Davis.