The Evergreen Review, a Beat Generation Icon, Is Campaigning for a Revival

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.

“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.