Literary magazine gets a new life
ADAM Ross was more than 100 pages into a new novel about a child actor in 1970s New York when a rare opportunity came up. The Sewanee Review, a 125-year-old literary journal that published some of the 20th century’s greatest American writers, was seeking a new editor.
There was a catch. Once a towering institution within American culture, the review had languished over the decades as its influence and readership had waned. The journal, which once published works by literary giants like Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, TS Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stevens, was nearly moribund. When Ross was approached to apply for the position, the review had just a few hundred subscribers, and virtually no web presence. Its plain blue cover hadn’t changed since 1944. Reviving it seemed daunting.
But Ross decided the potential rewards outweighed the risks of failure and the cost of delaying the progress of his novel. About a year and a half ago, he took the job.
“This is a magazine with some of the greatest DNA in the American literary ecosystem,” said Ross, who has lived in Nashville, Tennessee, for 22 years. “That seemed worth slowing my literary career down for.”
Since Ross took over, individual subscriptions have climbed to 700, from 389 in January. (With schools and libraries included, the review now has a circulation of more than 1,000.)
But more than that, Ross has restored some of the journal’s cultural cache. The winter 2017 issue featured work by prominent writers like Lauren Groff, Stephanie Danler, Adam Kirsch and John Jeremiah Sullivan, who contributed an essay about the first blues song. It also included two debut fiction writers: John R Sesgo from Madrid, whose work surfaced in the review’s slush pile, and Sidik Fofana, who was recommended to Ross by the writer Lorrie Moore. The journalist and historian Jon Meacham contributed two TheSewaneeReview, essays, one each about Hillary Clinton and President Donald Trump that were published in parallel columns.
At a publication that, for most of its history, skewed white and male, Ross has made a point of publishing women and writers from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. The new spring issue includes an autobiographical essay by the novelist Hannah Pittard about the dissolution of her marriage and an English translation of a triptych of stories by the Mexican novelist Mónica Lavín.
Sullivan said that he was hopeful that Ross could make the quarterly feel relevant again. “It went from a sort of indis- pensable place on the map of American letters to almost invisibility,” Sullivan said. “It’s too soon to say, but he has the editorial attitude I like best, which is no rules except for taste.”
The Sewanee Review never had a broad national subscriber base, which made its outsized role in American literature all the more remarkable. Founded in 1892 at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, the review started as an outlet focused on theology, philosophy, politics and literary criticism. Its influence grew in the mid-1940s under the editors Allen Tate and Andrew Lytle, who added fiction, essays and poetry. In its heyday, it published writers like Katherine Anne Porter, Dylan Thomas, Flannery O’Connor and Saul Bellow.
The review’s prominence began to fade in the late 1970s. George Core, who edited the journal for 43 years, sought to preserve the publication’s exacting editorial standards and its place in Southern literary culture. While American literary culture evolved, the review stuck to its buttoned-down style and traditions.
When Core retired in 2015, a committee began searching for a successor.
“At first I thought, Who’s going to want to touch it?” said the novelist Alice McDermott, who was on the committee. “It’s this monolith, this great literary magazine, but also something from a fading past.”
Robert Wilson, editor of The American Scholar, contacted Ross in September 2015, and urged him to apply.
In some ways, Ross was not an obvious choice for a journal with deep Southern roots. Ross, 50, was born and raised in New York City, where, as a child, he appeared in commercials, radio dramas and several TV shows. In college, he turned to writing. In 2010, Knopf published his debut novel, Mr Peanut, about a computer game designer who becomes a suspect when his wife is found dead in their home with peanuts in her throat.
But Ross’s status as something of an outsider worked in his favour.
“He was very savvy about what the review needed to get a new and younger audience, and to keep itself alive,” McDermott said.
He spent a year revamping the magazine, incorporating visual elements for the first time and lining up a roster of literary heavy hitters for this year’s issues, among them Richard Russo and Francine Prose. He recruited the book jacket designers Peter Mendelsund and Oliver Munday to reimagine the cover, logo and the interior layout, and to create new covers for each issue, the review’s first redesign in more than 70 years. This fall, the review will publish its 500th edition.
“They published every major American writer there was,” said Gary Fisketjon, vice president and editor at large at Knopf. “That was in an age that kind of has passed. I like to think it’s an age that can occur again.” SewaneeReview. The