The Evergreen Review A Beat Generation Icon Is Campaigning For A Revival

The legendary review published orginal work by William Burroughs, Susan Sontag, and Allen Ginsberg, and now seeks to make a return for a new generation.

Launched in 1957 by Grove Press founder Barney Rosset, the Evergreen Review made its name as one of America’s best literary journals—publishing major American writers such as Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac, and many international authors like Jorge Luis Borges and Jean Genet—until it ceased print publication in 1973, later existing for a number of years as an online publication, and entirely ceasing publication the year after Rosset’s death in 2012.

Now, the reins of the Revew have been picked up by new leadership. OR Books co-publisher John Oakes, along with writer and critic Dale Peck, are bringing it back to masses by serving as the Review’s new publisher and editor-in-chief respectively. But they aren’t just blowing the dust off of the old Evergreen Review website, the two have launched a Kickstarter campaign to completely relaunch the Review as a robust and invigorating online literary magazine.

Stills from the Evergreen Review site in progress

“The new Evergreen builds on a legacy of searching out the stories that aren’t being told or aren’t being heard,” they write on their campaign page, “stories that challenge our sensibilities and expand our understanding of the way people actually live in the world and the way their truths can be expressed. Available free of charge online, the magazine features fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from an international array of new and established writers.”

Under a mission to expand the “contemporary literary conversation in ways that open up both the semantic and social contexts for the work [it] publishes,” the Review’s online issues will be published tri-annually, with its first issue featuring original work by writers Jeffrey Renard Allen, Gary Indiana, and Jade Sharma among others, along with contributions by filmmaker Frances Bodomo and photographer Hadji Johnali.

You can learn more about the Evergreen Review’s Kickstarter campaign, which is ongoing for another seven days, by visiting here.

About the author

Michael Barron

Books and Digest Editor

After obtaining a BA in Poetics from the Evergreen State College, Michael began his literary career at the independent publishing house New Directions. As an editor, he acquired books by and worked with writers such as Rachel Kushner, Rivka Galchen, Ahmed Bouanani, and Horacio Castellanos Moya, among others. After leaving New Directions in 2015, Michael began writing about literature and art for numerous publications, including Harper's, Vice, and Frieze, and took on consulting editorial positions at the UK-based literary press Fitzcarraldo Editions and the literary and art publication The White Review. He is currently writing a book on the cultural history of banishment.