The latest installment of Australia’s great literary journal The Lifted Brow is now out – and sold out! Ronnie Scott, the journal’s weirdly youthful proprietor and mastermind, is currently working on a limited second run, so do your best to get on that list (or desperately Craigslist anybody you know in Australia, begging them to find you a copy).
There are two reasons why this issue sold like hotcakes: first, the days when The Lifted Brow may have been the best-kept secret on the international literary stage appear to be over. And second, this issue is so damn much fun – and when was the last time you could say that about The New Republic?
It’s a travel-themed little behemoth of an issue this time around. Travel, as the old saw goes, can broaden the mind. Unfortunately, in this day and age, it can also get you blown up, dysenteried, dengued, taken hostage, flight delayed, flayed, beheaded, or at the very least pauperized. In recognition of these dismaying facts (and in the spirit of the aforementioned fun), this issue brings the world to you: dozens of writers, including Justin Rice, Clancy Martin, Andrew Holder, the insufferable Reif Larsen, Douglas Coupland, Benjamin Kunkel, the moderately sufferable Adam Golaski, the late David Foster Wallace (and yours truly), each hones in on a different corner of the world and tries to convey something of its flavor, its culture, its commonality, or its strenuous irrelevance. The issue also features two CDs of vaguely world-themed music by lots of people I’ve never heard of (but it sure filled my room with strange and ultimately alluring sounds when I popped it into my computer!) – all in the service of The Lifted Brow’s obvious (though unstated, because that would be so stuffy) message, that literature should be collaborative, multi-genre, and invigorating, while we’re all young. To keep us all young. To make us all young.
So it’s an odd position I find myself in here: I’m unabashedly plugging a great literary production that’s almost completely unavailable specifically because of how great it is. Nevertheless, do your best. Go to the website, spring for a subscription (so this doesn’t happen to you again!), look around, sign up for yet another reprint of this issue. It’s got lots of art, lots of good words, and lots of good music – it’s worth the bother.
