Introducing The Fortnightly Review

Welcome to the new New Series

What follows is the text of the welcome message posted on the new Substack edition of The Fortnightly Review, the storied literary magazine of which I am now editor-in-chief. If you’re interested in poetry, avant-garde fiction, literary criticism, and dispatches from writers around the globe, please click the button to subscribe. It’s absolutely free.

The original TFR was founded in 1865 by Anthony Trollope, and its first editor was George Eliot’s lover, George Henry Lewes. It ran for nearly a century before ceasing publication in 1954, only to be revised online in 2009 by Denis Boyles, who called it the The Fortnightly Review: New Series. The new New Series will be a Substack. Inverting the usual meaning of “fortnightly,” we plan to publish two posts per week. Wednesdays will be devoted to poetry, while stories, reviews, interviews, dispatches, and everything else will appear on Saturdays. Our very first post, scheduled for Saturday, March 1, kicks things off with an interview I conducted last fall with former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. The following Wednesday expect new poems from Rae Armantrout. And then we’re off to the races! Join us, won’t you? Tell all your literary friends.

Welcome to a magazine in transition! For fifteen years, under the inspired leadership of Denis Boyles, The Fortnightly Review has been an online haven for some of the most inspired and idiosyncratic trans-Atlantic poetry, literature, and commentary written today. His passing in late 2023 left the future of the enterprise in question; as Associate Editor Katie Lehman has put it, "Denis was Fortnightly." But I am thrilled to announce, thanks to the generosity and good will of Denis' family, especially his daughter Maggie Boyles, that TFR will continue in its mission, even as it takes new forms.

I am pleased to welcome TFR alum Marc Vincenz, the publisher of MadHat Press, to our masthead as Translations Editor; Marc is also the new editor and publisher of our Odd Volumes series. Our new Fiction Editor, Christina Milletti, will bring an exciting new emphasis on innovative and unsettling fiction to the magazine. And I am delighted to welcome Paige Blackburn as the person who will keep the gears turning as our new Managing Editor. I am grateful as well that so many of the remarkable folks on TFR's masthead, including Poetry Editors Robert Archambeau and Peter Robinson, have agreed to continue to help us discover and publish the best new writing from the U.K., the USA, and across the globe.

Though TFR will continue as a website, we believe that the future of the magazine lies in delivering new poetry, fiction, translations, and commentary directly to subscriber's inboxes in the form of a Substack. These subscriptions are free to all, though we will be offering premium subscriptions to those who wish to support our work. Sign up today!

While we get the new magazine up and running (picture us scurrying about in full steampunk accoutrement, adjusting pneumatic tubes with giant wrenches), please enjoy this Winter update, which includes four prose poems by the Belgian surrealists Gabriel and Marcel Piqueray, translated by Bob Archambeau and Jean-Luc Garneau; a new excerpt of Anthony Howell's epic poem The Runiad; poems by Frank Nims and Paige Blackburn; Sally Connolly's brilliant essay on David Melnick's elegiac sequence A Pin's Fee; and Alessandro Cortello's review of Michelene Wandor's new experimental novel, Orfeo's Last Act.

The Fortnightly Review is dead; long live The Fortnightly Review!