Even though it shut down in 2003, The Partisan Review was the sort of publication whose articles and fiction deserve to be appreciated by future generations. Now, thanks to some heroic archivists, the magazine’s entire output from 1934 to its demise has been digitized, offering readers a chance to explore one of the most important intellectual institutions of the last century. Like The Partisan Review, some other great publications that have steered our cultural conversations about the arts, politics, and fiction, have also worked hard to get their back issues posted on the internet. Here are a few excellent examples to bookmark.
Want to read poems, articles, and reviews by everyone from Ezra Pound to Amiri Baraka, Sylvia Plath, Hart Crane, Slavoj Žižek, Adrienne Rich, and just about every other big literary name from the last 102 years? The online archive of Poetry magazine should keep you covered.
The Paris Review has not only featured fiction by some of the most important writers since its founding in 1953, but it has also published interviews with all of them as well. Since some of the older issues could set you back a pretty penny, we should all be grateful that they’ve been working tirelessly to get them posted online.
Its two monthly issues are worth the price of a subscription, but the archives featuring 13,500 articles by more than 2000 contributors really make the dollars you spend on the LRB a fine investment.
This old-guard leftie magazine has been catching up in recent years, getting younger writers to contribute, and also posting its archives since the early 1970s.
If current issues haven’t convinced you to shell out for a subscription, perhaps it would help to know that the magazine’s online archives go all the way back to its first issue from 1925.
Want to know more about the Best Young British Novelists of 1983? Get a subscription to Granta, and you can spend all day reading about them online, along with quite a bit of the magazine’s other content from the last 30 years.
Again, you need a subscription, but once you have it, you’ll get online access to Harper’s archives all the way back to the mid-1800s.
Since they sort of picked up the slack when magazines like The Partisan Review started to fall off, it’s only fitting that we end off this list with the 18 issues of n+1 that you can pick through online.