I subscribe to more literary magazines than I can keep up with. At last count, the number was somewhere around fourteen, which means that on any given week, there’s a new issue arriving in my mailbox or my inbox that I haven’t finished the previous issue of. This is a problem I’m happy to have. Literary magazines are, in my opinion, the most underrated part of the reading ecosystem, and I want to make the case for them here, along with some specific recommendations for magazines worth your time and money.

First, a clarification. When I say “literary magazine,” I’m talking about periodicals that publish fiction, poetry, essays, and sometimes art or criticism. Some are print-only. Some are online-only. Some do both. They range in size from tiny hand-stapled chapbooks run by one person to established institutions with decades of history and paid staff. What they all have in common is that they publish work that might not find a home anywhere else: short stories that are too weird for mainstream magazines, poems by emerging writers, essays that wander in productive ways, translations from languages you don’t speak. If the publishing industry is a forest, literary magazines are the understory, the layer beneath the canopy where all the interesting stuff grows.

I want to start with why literary magazines matter, especially now. In an era when most book marketing is driven by algorithms and bestseller lists, literary magazines are one of the last places where editorial judgment, actual human taste, determines what gets published. An editor at a literary magazine reads submissions and selects work based on quality, not marketability. This means you encounter writing that no algorithm would ever surface: a story about a dentist’s existential crisis, a poem about a grandmother’s hands, an essay about the architecture of parking garages. These are not clickbait topics. They are the stuff of literature, and they’re alive in literary magazines in a way they’re not anywhere else.

Literary magazines are also where most writers get their start. Before an author publishes a novel, they’ve usually published stories or poems in magazines. The magazine publication is a credential, a signal to agents and editors that someone with taste has read this writer’s work and deemed it worth sharing. For emerging writers, getting into a good literary magazine is the first rung on a very long ladder. For readers, it’s a chance to discover writers before the rest of the world catches on. I’ve found some of my favorite authors by reading their early stories in small journals. By the time their first book came out, I felt like I’d known them for years.

So here are some magazines I think are worth reading. I’m going to be opinionated, because the whole point of a recommendation list is having opinions, and I’m going to explain what I like about each one rather than just listing names.

The Paris Review is the obvious starting point, and I almost didn’t include it because everyone knows about it. But it deserves its reputation. The fiction is consistently excellent, the poetry is well-curated, and the interviews with writers (their “Art of Fiction” series, which has been running since the 1950s) are some of the best conversations about writing that exist in any form. Each issue feels like a small anthology. If you’re only going to subscribe to one literary magazine, this is probably the one.

Tin House was a Portland-based magazine that ran from 1999 to 2019, and even though it stopped publishing its print magazine (they now run a book imprint), the back issues are worth seeking out. Tin House had a knack for finding writers right before they broke through. Their fiction was smart and surprising, their essays were personal without being self-indulgent, and they had a sense of humor that a lot of literary magazines lack. If you can find back issues at a used bookstore, grab them.

Granta, published in London, is excellent if you want a global perspective. Each issue is themed (“Travel,” “Family,” “Work”), and they draw contributors from around the world. The writing tends toward long-form nonfiction and literary fiction, and the quality is remarkably consistent. Granta has been publishing since 1889, which gives it a kind of institutional confidence. They know what they’re doing, and it shows. The themed format also makes each issue feel cohesive in a way that many magazines don’t.

One Story, based in Brooklyn, publishes exactly one short story per issue. That’s it. One story, in a slim, elegantly designed pamphlet that arrives in the mail every three or four weeks. I love the simplicity of the concept. Instead of competing for attention with twenty other pieces, the single story gets your complete focus. And because the editors are staking the entire issue on one piece, the selection is ruthless. Every story they publish has to be strong enough to stand alone, and they almost always are.

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern is unlike any other literary magazine in existence. Each issue is a physical object designed to surprise you: one issue came in a box of smaller booklets, another was shaped like a letter, another included a comb. The design is part of the experience. The writing tends toward the experimental and playful, which isn’t everyone’s taste, but if you’re tired of conventional literary fiction, McSweeney’s is a tonic. Dave Eggers founded it in 1998, and it’s maintained a consistent identity of smart weirdness for over two decades.

The Sun, out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is my personal favorite, and it’s the one I always recommend to people who think they don’t like literary magazines. The Sun publishes personal essays, fiction, poetry, and interviews, and it does so with a warmth and honesty that I’ve never found elsewhere. There are no ads. The design is clean and understated. The writing is deeply human, often drawn from personal experience, and ranges from quietly devastating to unexpectedly funny. I’ve read every issue for the past six years, and I’ve never been disappointed.

Ploughshares, affiliated with Emerson College, is one of the longest-running literary magazines in the country. Each issue is guest-edited by a different writer, which means the aesthetic shifts from issue to issue. This can be a strength or a weakness depending on the guest editor, but over time, the variety is refreshing. You get exposure to different tastes and sensibilities, which keeps the reading experience from getting stale.

AGNI, published by Boston University, is another excellent long-running journal that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. The fiction is strong, but their real standout is essays and translated work. If you’re interested in writing from other countries and traditions, AGNI is a reliable source. They also maintain a generous online archive, so you can sample their work before committing to a subscription.

Zyzzyva, out of San Francisco, focuses on West Coast writers and has a distinctive visual aesthetic that sets it apart from East Coast literary magazines. The fiction and nonfiction tend to be adventurous without being inaccessible, and there’s a sense of place in many of the pieces that I find appealing. It’s a magazine that feels rooted in a specific geography, which gives it character.

For poetry specifically, I’d recommend Poetry magazine, which has been publishing since 1912 and remains the gold standard. If you think you don’t like poetry, read a few issues of Poetry; there’s a good chance your opinion is based on the poetry you encountered in high school, which is nobody’s best introduction to the form. Poetry publishes work that ranges from formal to experimental, accessible to challenging, and the variety is part of the appeal.

On the online side, Electric Literature publishes excellent fiction and essays, with a particular strength in literary criticism that’s actually readable (a rarer quality than you’d think). They also run “Recommended Reading,” a series that pairs a new short story with an introduction by an established writer, which is a great way to discover new voices.

The Rumpus, founded by Stephen Elliott, is an online magazine that covers books, culture, and the writing life. Their book reviews are honest and thoughtful, their essays are personal and often moving, and they have a feature called “Dear Sugar” (originally written by Cheryl Strayed) that is, in my opinion, some of the best advice writing ever published. The Rumpus feels like a conversation with a smart, slightly irreverent friend who reads a lot.

Guernica is an online magazine focused on the intersection of art and politics. If you want writing that engages with the world, that wrestles with questions of justice and power and identity without being preachy, Guernica is excellent. They publish fiction, poetry, essays, and art, and the editorial voice is confident without being strident.

I should also mention a few university-affiliated journals that punch well above their weight. The Georgia Review, published by the University of Georgia, is a longstanding quarterly with particularly strong essays and book reviews. The Gettysburg Review, out of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, has a quiet, deliberate editorial approach that results in consistently high-quality fiction and poetry. The Iowa Review, connected to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, publishes a mix of emerging and established writers, and reading it gives you a sense of what’s happening at one of the most influential writing programs in the country. University-affiliated journals sometimes get overlooked because they don’t have the name recognition of The Paris Review or McSweeney’s, but the writing is often just as good, and the subscription prices tend to be lower.

For readers interested in genre-adjacent literary fiction, Conjunctions, edited by Bradford Morrow, is a journal that lives at the intersection of literary and experimental, with a willingness to publish work that defies easy classification. Each issue has a theme, and the themes tend to be expansive enough to accommodate a wide range of approaches. I’ve discovered more genuinely surprising writing in Conjunctions than in almost any other magazine.

A word about gift subscriptions. A literary magazine subscription is, in my opinion, one of the best gifts you can give a reader. It arrives regularly, it’s always different, and it introduces the recipient to writers they wouldn’t have found on their own. It’s the kind of gift that keeps giving for an entire year, and at the end, the recipient has a stack of magazines that they can revisit whenever they want. I’ve given more magazine subscriptions as gifts than I can count, and the response is almost always the same: genuine surprise, followed by enthusiastic engagement once the first issue arrives.

Now, a few practical notes about reading literary magazines. First: you don’t have to read every piece. A literary magazine is not a novel. You can skip the poem that doesn’t grab you and go straight to the essay. You can read one story, put the issue down, and come back to it a week later. The format rewards browsing, and there’s no obligation to be completist about it.

Second: subscriptions are almost always a better deal than buying individual issues, and they also support the magazines financially, which matters. Most literary magazines operate on razor-thin budgets. Your subscription money goes directly toward paying writers and keeping the lights on. Subscribing to a literary magazine is one of the most direct ways a reader can support living writers.

Third: if you’re a writer, reading literary magazines is part of your education. You need to know what’s being published, what the current conversations are, what editors are interested in. You also need to know which magazines are a good fit for your own work before you start submitting. Submitting blindly to magazines you’ve never read is like applying for a job at a company you’ve never researched. It wastes your time and the editors’ time.

I’ll close with this: every book begins as something shorter. A novel starts as an idea that could have been a short story. A nonfiction book starts as an essay. The literary magazine is where those seeds are planted and watered. When you read a literary magazine, you’re reading the future of literature in its earliest form. You’re watching writers find their voices, test their ideas, take risks that a full-length book can’t afford. It’s one of the most exciting kinds of reading there is, and it costs less than a streaming subscription. Give one a try. I think you’ll be surprised by what you find.