It is most often a story of passion and friendship, a fancy way of saying that literary magazines spend more money than they make. Which doesn’t stop them from thriving. There are well over 1,000 of them in France, listed on the Entr’revues site, “the review of French-speaking journals” launched in 1986. Often multidisciplinary and financed with grants. crowdfunding (crowdfunding), sponsorships and subsidies (in particular from the CNL), they are the subject of small editions and some of them are self-distributed. Nothing that could deter new entrants such as the magazine Estrangelaunched in October 2023 and dedicated to the strange in all its forms with science fiction writings, but also Portofliocreated in January 2024, which publishes in its first quarterly issue a meeting between the cartoonist Enki Bilal and Invader, a street art figure, or even, at the initiative of the publishers Louis Vendel and Manor Askenazi, Letter Zolaa unique monthly magazine in the form of a book-envelope, sent by post, from a newly awarded author (Blandine Rinkel, Mathieu Palain, Maud Ventura, Sabyl Ghoussoub, etc.).
We will also mention, in this flood of novelties, the quarterly review Kometa (“comet” in Ukrainian) born on October 11, 2023 from the shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Under the editor-in-chief of Léna Mauger, former member of the magazine XXIit intends to shed light on the geopolitics of Eastern Europe with, as primary contributors, Emmanuel Carrère, Svetlana Alexievitch, Pierre Haski, Timothy Snyder…
The oldest magazines are not giving up, however, and are even getting a facelift like the famous New French Magazine (NRF)founded in February 1909 by André Gide and his friends Jean Schlumberger, Marcel Drouin, Jacques Copeau, etc.), whose issue 657 dated March 21 benefits from an elegant new formula directed by the journalist Olivia Giesbert, a former France Culture. There magazine “entirely written by writers” draws on the past and current heritage of the Gallimard house and unfolds the sections like a magazine. On the menu, a beautiful interview with Salman Rushdie, a prelude to the release, on April 18, of the story of the American-British writer of Indian origin on the attack of which he was the victim on August 12, 2022 in the State of New York, (The knife, Gallimard). Then follow a file “The time of wars”, supplied in particular by Annette Becker, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Fellag or even Scholastique Mukasonga, an analysis by Jonathan Littell of theHeliogabalusa new drama in four acts by Jean Genet, written in Fresnes in 1942, and a notebook of critiques.
Still at Gallimard, we announce, for April 5, the magazine Adventuresled by Yannick Haenel, in continuation of The Infinite. Finally, we will note the permanence of the oldest of them, the Revue des Deux Mondes, born in 1829, and owned by Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière. Which offers, in its April issue, an exploration of Wokist bastions, an article on Jean-François Revel, who would be 100 years old this year, and a trip to Tokyo, by Michaël Ferrier. Long life to magazines (and their readers)!
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