Back in the Lit Mag Groove!
Pen America article & controversy; AI "witch hunts"; Amazon Partnership grants; being in "query hell; submitting advice; new magazines; magazines closing; and more
Welcome to our biweekly news roundup!
Greetings Lit Magarazzi,
I’m back! And whoa nelly is there news to share, catch up on, mull, discuss, process…
This week we’re looking at a controversial report from PEN America; book deals being canceled and stories removed over AI-accusations; elitism in publishing; lit mags getting grants; writers succumbing to “query hell;” new magazines around the world; magazines closing; submitting advice; and much more.
It’s locked, loaded and jam-packed, friends, so fix yourself an espresso, lock your office door, close all your tabs, pull up a chair, sit down, buckle up, breathe deep and let’s go!
We begin with PEN America, an organization which says it “stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide.”
Last month, they published A Silent Moratorium, a blog post that documents the experiences of some Jewish and Israeli writers “who feel that the mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views.”
In interviews with PEN America, more than 30 Israeli and Jewish writers and literary professionals described a widening cultural isolation since the attacks of Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza. Many spoke of rising hostility and exclusion both domestically and internationally that has taken a heavy and worsening toll.
…They describe an environment that has impacted their reputations and livelihoods, led people to self-censor, and created an overall chilling of their ability to write and create freely. This silencing and exclusion of writers is a threat to what PEN America is fundamentally committed to defending: a culture of free expression for all.
Not surprisingly, the piece met immediate backlash from all directions. Soon after its publication, PEN America Director Dinaw Mengetsu resigned from the organization with a 15-page letter, saying on Instagram,
The cultural boycott of Israel is aimed at instituions, not individuals, to influence policy. There is no boycott of Jewish writers…
Many writers spoke up in support of Mengetsu’s resignation, with some calling the PEN article “fake victim propaganda,” a “screed” that is “tone deaf and embarrassing,” and arguing that “PEN is damaging its own reputation.”
Some have supported the article’s cause generally, while criticizing this specific blog, noting, “it does not help anyone to promulgate a mishmash of writers’ resentments and rumors and paranoid fantasies...”
Others have argued that the article is “not in the least polemical,” while appreciating that “There is room for skepticism about some of the report’s specifics.” Still others have followed up the article with supporting data, while noting, “What’s sad is that we can’t have an honest conversation about this.”
There are many more articles circulating, along with backlash to the articles, additional statements, plus statements about the statements and backlash to the statements about the statements, all adding up to what some reasonably conclude to be “a sequence of events that likely pleased no one.”
Meanwhile, some literary news sites have not linked to the article at all. Poets & Writers, which provides daily news from the literary world, and which routinely covers book bans and issues related to censorship, made no mention of PEN’s piece when it was published on July 9th. Not until July 13th did they mention it, though in the context of Mengestu’s resignation, and without linking to PEN’s site.
On July 16th, Poets & Writers mentioned it once more, though here in the context of a New York Times article in which two co-chief executives at PEN defend the organization. Yet rather than cite the contents of the article in question, Poets & Writers calls it simply “an article about Israeli and Jewish authors…”
LitHub, which also provides daily and weekly news roundups, and which on any given day is a veritable smorgasbord of articles about identity and identity-based grievances, also neglected to mention PEN’s article in their news sections, not even with qualifiers such as writers claim or writers allege…
Such silence is striking. Whether they support the article and its findings or not, why wouldn’t these sources for literary news at least mention its existence?
Moving on, and speaking of controversy, LLM’s have infiltrated our literary space and whoa is it…messy.
Many news sites reported last week on a major book deal that collapsed due to accusations of AI usage. And when I say “major book deal,” I mean major frickin book deal.
The hotly anticipated manuscript Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, by Jerry Falade, was withdrawn from sale by its agent despite reportedly receiving an offer for [$2.4 million] from Minotaur, owned by Macmillan US, as part of a 14-way auction. The plan was to publish it in 2028.
Yes, the book sold for $2.4 million in a fourteen-way auction. And then, over suspicions of AI usage, the contract was simply dropped! Worst of all, the author denies using AI for writing!!
As Jon Del Arroz writes at Fandom Pulse,
The book was good enough to sell for $2.4 million and get international publishers fighting over it. Then a second round of questions arrived, nobody could produce a smoking gun either direction, and the deal died anyway. Not because anyone proved the author used AI. Because nobody could prove a negative fast enough to satisfy the room.
This news might not make it into this newsletter, which focuses exclusively on lit mags. (Be sure to sign up for Beyond Lit Mags if you want more book coverage at large!) But this sort of cancelation is beginning to happen at lit mags too, albeit on a much smaller scale.
Last month Apex Book Company, which publishes Apex Magazine, announced,
It has been brought to our attention that a story in Issue 153 of Apex Magazine, “Vigil of the Tenth Air,” is suspected of being written with AI assistance. After careful review, we have decided to remove the story from our website…
Additionally, upon further investigation, a story shortlisted for Violet Lichen’s upcoming anthology ECO25: the Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction, was found to be attributed to the pen name Irene W. Collins, whose work has been recently removed from several other short fiction publications under suspicion of AI usage. While this story was not selected for publication, we will be removing it from the ECO25 shortlist announcements on both the Apex Book Company and Violet Lichen websites.
It is unclear from their statement what steps were taken to confirm whether the stories in question were, in fact, written with AI. From this statement, it does appear the works were removed from suspicions alone.
Is this how editors should proceed? What steps are editors taking to keep AI out of their magazines while also avoiding the unwarranted removal of writers’ work?
Or, in fact, is this issue one that is not actually affecting literary magazines quite so much as genre mags?
In Book Publishing Doesn’t Know What It Thinks About AI—and It Shows, Brooke Warner makes a fascinating argument that AI detection tools might find more false positives within genre fiction than in literary fiction, and explores how this relates to elitism within publishing at large.
The bias in book publishing against genre fiction has deep roots. These genres have long been seen by the publishing elite as “lesser than.” Book publishing is legendary for its snobbery…
In short, there’s a reason we’re seeing these scandals rocking the world of genre fiction as opposed to literary or upmarket or historical fiction. You can break it down into two categories: 1) The authors are less likely to be trained writers coming out of MFA programs. Their writing is propulsive and for the masses, by design, and they may not hold themselves to the same literary standards, and I don’t mean that as a criticism. 2) The readership is enormous and very online, which means there’s going to be a lot more fans, but also a lot more scrutiny (like Reddit threads and social media influencers who make it their job to pick apart every single detail of a book).
Warner concludes (and I could not agree more):
AI has unleashed a toxic mix of paranoia, accusations, superiority, purity tests, cancellations, scapegoating, and unequal treatment of authors. We are in desperate need of industry-wide standards. Instead, we’re left with case-by-case improvisation, and individual authors…then pay the price for the industry’s systemic inaction and hand-wringing. Dear God, we have to do better.
In more positve news (maybe), Amazon, which partners with the Academy of American Poets and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) for the Literary Partenrship grants, has announced its 2026 grant recipients.
Amazon today announced the 2026 recipients of the Amazon Literary Partnership, providing $1 million in grants to 102 literary organizations across more than 25 states. Amazon believes in the power of words to transform lives, communities, and the world, and is honored to support these vital organizations that champion writers.
This year’s magazine recipients include Alaska Quarterly Review, Callaloo, Electric Literature, Epiphany, Mizna, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, Off Assignment, One Story, Inc., SISTORIES, The Offing, and others.
Congrats are certainly in order for all. Though one editor wrote to me,
Here are the list of recent grants winners for the Amazon grant facilitated by CLMP. You’ll notice five that have won every year CLMP has administered the grant. These are great mags, no doubt, but it’s almost like there weren’t 100’s of other magazine grant applications. Should there be a limit on how many years in a row you can win?
And one writer wrote to me,
Curious if you've noticed how many litmags that received part of that $18M Amazon grant last week still charge sub fees. Sort of shoots the whole "golly gee whiz it's so hard to stay afloat something's gotta pay Submittable" excuse straight out of the water.
Maybe the grant money will enable some mags to stop charging submission fees? Ah, we can dream!
Anyway, all I can say is, I’m glad to see that Narrative Magazine, which has been a grant recipient seven times and likely received over $25,000 in grant funding, and whose predatory practices I’ve documented in detail, is not on the list.
Might this have something to do with my reaching out to CLMP in March to ask about their judging process and why Narrative continued to receive funding? Might it have to do with my pointing out that Nicole Dewey is both the Chair of CLMP’s Board of Directors and on Narrative’s Board of Directors?
We will never know, friends. What I can say is I’m glad to see many new lit mags on this list now.
Moving on, we’ve got reflections upon the lit scene ranging from the humorous to the informational to the curious and questioning.
In A Story of Literary Masochism, Former Tahoma Literary Review and Orca Magazine Editor Joe Ponepinto writes of finding contentment in his current literary life and yet, for some insane reason, deciding to throw himself into the novel-pitching trenches and now finding himself “in query hell.”
…I can’t help thinking that although I never achieved my dream of literary success, I had moved past my frustrations and was happy with my life. Now each day I spend a couple of hours in the first circle of query hell, and during that time I am frustrated, disheartened, and generally miserable.
I know I need to give it some time and really put in a focused effort, but I can already feel that this is going to be a monumental pain in the ass…
Querying a novel is “a monumental pain in the ass.” Oh, truer words were never said, Joe!
In How many more online lit mags will drop before the end of 2026?, Alexandra Naughton, Editor of Be About it Press, writes about the surge of new online magazines, a surge of new “fake magazines,” and her own experiences of editing.
There are quite a few I’ve seen in the past couple weeks and I’m sure I didn’t catch notice of them all. Some of them are getting buzz, some of them are getting scorn, and some are probably entering the scene without much of a splash at all.
We’ve got Deadbeat (a print only magazine requesting only your very worst poems), we’ve got Saint (a print-only magazine publishing “transgressive” work in limited runs), we’ve got The Cult Lit (a magazine where writers are invited to submit via summons from other writers who had previously been summoned, and as of July 15, 2026 has locked down their Twitter account but still has not fixed the ai-generated typo in their header from surnmons to summons), and there are probably more that I’m forgetting to mention but I think you get the gist.
In The Hardest Part of Submitting to Literary Magazines, Janelle Drumwright offers stellar advice for anyone looking to navigate this complicated maze.
While many literary magazines recommend you read their latest issue to get a sense of what they publish before submitting, if you’re like me, you don’t have time for that. Here’s what I do instead…
In Why I’m Writing a Book Called Unhappy Endings, Ashley Mangtani writes about the closing of literary magazines and what it means for our culture.
The famous journals will survive. Granta and The Paris Review have institutions behind them, donors, universities, archives. What holds the rest of the ecosystem upright is the middle, the magazines run on evenings and overdrafts, and the middle is where writers become writers.
Several lit mags got profiles recently.
At Autostraddle, Lauren Herold reports that For 50 Years, Sinister Wisdom Has Said Yes To Lesbians in Print.
An all-volunteer run organization, Sinister Wisdom works to create multi-class, multicultural, multi-gender, multi-racial, world-wide intergenerational queer and lesbian spaces. Founded in 1976, Sinister Wisdom releases quarterly editions of its journal, which has published the work of hundreds of lesbians over its 50 years in print, including iconic writers like Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Minnie Bruce Pratt.
At The College Fix, Boone Simms reports on ‘Renewal in the arts’: New conservative literary quarterly prioritizes creation over critique.
The venerable conservative religious journal First Things has launched a new quarterly literary publication that aims to explore and promote beauty, literature, and art in the face of today’s highly politicized climate.
Portico will publish writing “of the highest quality on topics of artistic and literary significance to contribute to a renewal in the arts,” according to its website. The second printed issue came out earlier this month.
AT KLCC Live, Rachel McDonald interviews Brian Trapp, Editor-in-Chief of Northwest Review, “a University of Oregon literary magazine that first published in 1957 and went out of print in 2011,” and which “relaunched in June as a digital publication.”
Says Trapp,
Yeah, it’s one of the great literary magazines, university literary magazines of the 20th century. I mean, if you look at the authors that it’s published, there’s just a huge list of esteemed 20th century writers, especially Northwest writers: Ursula Le Guin, Louis Erdrich, Raymond Carver, Barry Lopez, William Stafford.
The coolest thing too is that it has a legacy of publishing or finding emerging writers who became major voices. So, Ken Kesey’s first short story was published in 1957. George Saunders’ first short story was published in 1986…And so, it has that history, but it’s also a sort of a collective endeavor of the Eugene community, and so, it’s really a great thing and I’m happy to bring it back.
And a new mag in Portugal has launched.
The Lisbon Literary Review is being created to celebrate poetry and translation in Portuguese and English, and to encourage dialogue between these two languages, cultures, and literary traditions.
We…invite poets and translators — emerging or established — to contribute original work and authorized translations, and to take part in the making of a new literary space.
Lastly, several magazines have announced their closing.
On X, Door is a Jar posted:
Stanchion Editor Jeff Bogle posted:
Suburban Review posted on Instagram:
As for us, whew this month is going to be busy and fun!
This Wednesday, August 5th I’ll be interviewing Eda Easter, Editor of Last Girls’ Club: The Witches’ Cosmo.
On Thursday, August 6th I’ll be interviewing Wendy Lesser, Editor of The Threepenny Review.
You can find out more about these interviews and register to attend the discussions right here:
Also! Beginning next week I’ll be rolling out the new feature, Beyond Lit Mags. I’ll be covering news stories in the literary world at large. You can learn about that and sign up to make sure you receive this newsletter right here:
And that you plane hoppers and continent-wide commuters, you summer travelers to faraway lands and you remainers in a single place where it’s nice and comfortable thank you very much, you lost in the sizzle of a foreign tongue, you tangling in the tastes of melted ice cubes on the veranda, you at the zoo, you on the beach, you frantically and feverishly losing and recovering your passport over and over in a fumbling cycle of away-from-home anxiety and feelings of too much anxious freedom, you on your way, you newly returned, you who just barely made the flight, and god is that not the worst feeling, racing through the airport as it literally grows bigger all around you like a nightmare, or a perfect dream, you taking off, and you, everywhere, so sweetly landing, again and again, is the news in literary magazines.
Have a fantastic week, pals.
Fondly,
Becky
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I applaud PEN’s stance on this issue. There is absolutely a silencing effect on Jewish and Israeli writers. Some writers I know worry that their Jewish surnames affect the odds of their pieces being accepted. To me, it almost seems as if including the word “Gaza” triples the chances of acceptance.
Becky, this is a fantastic and agonizing overview of the current state of the literary ecosphere. I was flabbergasted by the cancellation of a 2.4 million contract and dismayed by the AI finger-pointing. As heartbroken as I have felt about the civilian casualties in Gaza and the settlers’ violence in the West Bank, I am dismayed that there is so much blowback on Israeli writers. I wish George Orwell were still alive to help us sort out the rights and wrongs of this strange new world we’re living in. This is why we need literature.