Editor Interview: The Little Review

Poems & waspish criticism

In terms of magazines, we admire The Fence and Private Eye for proving that serious journalism and mischief can go hand-in-hand. Most poetry magazines are unreadably dull, but we have enjoyed the odd bit of prose in Poetry Birmingham and The London Magazine (in print), while Perverse and Basket have published some entertaining poems (online). As for poetry books, Guillemot's are elegant, Prototype's are surprising, and Bloodaxe's are often entertaining despite their eye-wateringly ugly covers.

10 dead poets we enjoy: WS Graham, Gwendolyn Brooks, Edna St Vincent Millay, Gloria Komai, Weldon Kees, Marianne Moore, Philip Larkin, Margaret Cavendish, John Berryman, Anon.
Living poets we enjoy: see list of contributors at www.thelittlereview.co.uk/key
10 reviewers (living and dead) we enjoy: Randall Jarrell, Patricia Lockwood, Clive James, Dorothy Parker, William Empson, Kay Ryan, William Logan, Helena Nelson, Anthony Madrid and the mob who tore apart Cinna the poet.

Ten things that make The Little Review unusual:
1: The Little Review is sold in more UK bookshops than any other magazine dedicated to poetry.
2: We are printed in a distinctive, tiny format, small enough to slip into any pocket.
3: Our reviewers actually say what they think, and will admit that certain books are bad. Not unrelatedly, our reviews are a pleasure to read: witty, impassioned, provocative. We will publish nothing that sounds like a publisher's blurb or academic essay.
4: We do not print our writers' names next to their work; instead, there is a discreet set of initials, decoded at the back of the magazine.
5: Some of the reviews we publish are written in verse.
6: Some of the poems we publish take the form of comic strips.
7: Our Arts pages explore awkward liaisons between poetry and other artforms: eg. the poems in the Adam Driver movie Paterson; Picasso's phallic verse; recent books on the poetics of Taylor Swift; etc.
8: The magazine has a dedicated 'Insolence & Triviality' section, where we print gossip, aphorisms, satire, crossword puzzles and highly unflattering interviews with writers.
9: We have a unique submissions policy: anyone sending poems to the magazine must send at least one book review per poem.
10: We have no respect at all for poets – they are, in most cases, quite awful – but we respect poems.

Please – we beg of you! – actually read our submissions page (thelittlereview.co.uk/submit). We constantly receive poems from people who have ignored the submissions rules. We don't read those poems, of course, but nonetheless we enjoy receiving them: it's nice to have something to use for kindling.

Three kinds of submission we enjoy:
IDEAL # 1: Four wise and witty reviews of books published in the last year (one positive review, two very negative reviews, one in between) accompanied by no more than three poems, each of them uniquely brilliant.
IDEAL # 2: An entertaining and well-researched feature on a niche aspect of the literary world, featuring scabrous gossip and eyebrow-raising quotes from multiple well-placed sources.
IDEAL #3: A revelatory long essay about a dead writer that makes us read their work in a new way.

They ignore 'the NB rule': unless you have been explicitly told otherwise, if your submission contains more poems than book reviews it will not be read, and may not receive a response.

We have no interest whatsoever in the lives or careers of our contributors. We care about writing, not writers.

Our editor – poor, sentimental fool that he is – personally reads every word of every submission, so long as the submission has not broken the NB rule.
That said, he occasionally fails to finish submissions that are so wildly inappropriate for TLR that he assumes they were sent to us in error (eg. a 10,000-word technical paper on engineering; a listicle about workout techniques intended for a health & fitness magazine; an unsolicited book-length memoir about sports).

Every piece sent to the magazine is printed out (with the author's name removed) and read in hard-copy by the editor, then placed in one of two piles, labelled 'maybe' and 'no'. Pieces that end up in the 'maybe' pile are re-read by the editor several times before a handful of them are accepted for publication.

The editor rises at ten or eleven in the morning, often hungover, and sends a dozen emails apologising for his failure to meet various deadlines, in four or five of his unrelated freelance jobs.
He spends half an hour hand-addressing envelopes, stuffing and sealing them, then trots down to the post office to send off copies of The Little Review to readers, subscribers and bookshops who have ordered it.
He eats a lunch of wilting lettuce (12-12.30pm), and stares forlornly at a wall (12.30pm-2pm).
From 2pm-6pm, he tries and fails to complete the aforementioned overdue freelance work.
From 6pm-7pm, he dines on thin gruel and stares at a different wall.
From 7pm-2am he edits, proofreads and typesets the contents for The Little Review's latest 176-page issue, emailing back and forth with around 30-40 contributors per edition. He bites his nails; his hair falls out; he resorts to laudanum and absinthe.
He falls into fitful sleep at 3am. Seven hours later, the whole awful-but-cheerful cycle begins again.

Some pieces require more editing than others; we have, in the past, edited 5,000-word pieces down into 500-word pieces. Occasionally a poem or review will go through half a dozen rounds of editing, but usually a single round is enough. The author is always given the chance to approve or reject the final edit.

Poems published in The Little Review are nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (written).

The Little Review does not require any external funding: it runs at a profit on the proceeds from sales and subscriptions, as well as receiving a very small amount of advertising revenue.

We host live events in different cities, attend book fairs, and publish selected highlights from the magazine in our weekly Substack/email newsletter.