The Mumpsimus

According to Inside Higher Ed , Middlebury College has announced that it will pull funding from The New England Review by 2011 "if the publication doesn't become self-supporting." This hits home for me in a few ways -- NER was one of the first lit mags I ever read, because at the time I became interested in such things, the local college library subscribed (and still does). As a teenager, I attended the Bread Loaf Young Writers' Conference , met the managing editor, and got her to sign a copy of the magazine for me (for a while, NER was known as The New England Review & Bread Loaf Quarterly , and I still tend to think of it as NER/BLQ ). Later, I attended the adult version of Bread Loaf , and though NER 's official relationship with the conference was less by then, many of its staff members still attended, as well as numerous writers it had published. NER was also one of the earliest supporters of Best American Fantasy , and I'm thrilled that BAF 3...

When we were working on the first volume of Best American Fantasy , I said to Jeff and Ann that I wished we could reprint some nonfiction, because some of the most wondrous things I'd encountered were essays. I had New England Review at the forefront of my mind when I said this, because I sit down and read each issue that arrives immediately, and most of what excites me is the eclectic nonfiction they publish (which is not to say the poems and stories they publish are not exciting, too; many are, and I've passed some on to Ann and Jeff. Yes, we're still working on BAF 2, the "patience is a virtue" edition...) The latest issue of NER contains an essay by J.M. Tyree, "Lovecraft at the Automat". It's not an essay that will offer too much that's new to a Lovecraft devotee, I expect, but I'm only a casual Lovecraftian, and generally more interested in his life and circumstances than in his writing. It's fun, though, to see a journal lik...