UPDATE
Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism was recently retired as a regular anthology to accommodate MRCentral.net, an interactive community that has built itself around Margin's focus. However, Margin is in the process of being redesigned and archived in its entirety and will remain a free-access web anthology with all its pages intact for the life of the site. If you have trouble accessing the site, it's possible you tried to enter during site upgrades; keep trying.about Margin
"I created Margin initially as a kind of bloggish pursuit back in 1998," says founding editor and publisher Tamara Kaye Sellman, "but my background in print media and a continued fascination with the global connectivity of the web eventually led me to launch Margin as an electronic literary anthology."With an international staff, broad-reaching departments and columns and consistent ongoing site traffic (Sellman cites more than 50,000 pageviews annually for the highly specialized journal), Margin has become the leading resource for students, writers and educators of magical realism. It reaches an audience originating in more than 50 countries.
The anthology boasts award-winning work from the US and abroad, featuring heavyweights like Charles Simic, Aimee Bender, Sara Paretsky, Lawrence Raab, BH Fairchild, CK Williams, Frank X. Gaspar, Kathleen Alcalá, Franz Wright, Virgil Suárez, Dr. Gregory Rabassa, Brian Evenson, and interviews with influential people like author Isabel Allende and literary scholar Wendy B. Faris. Margin also gives equal time to up-and-coming voices in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and academic writing.
Many of the stories published at Margin have gone on to be reprinted or used in college literary classes around the world. Margin exists to promote magical realism as a valid and important literary form, as well as to promote the world's best writers of magical realism, who often struggle to market their work in a publishing environment that has difficulty categorizing postmodern literary forms.
Sellman continues to be motivated by in-roads the anthology has blazed. In 2000, Margin published an excerpt from a previously unpublished book manuscript translated by the world famous Dr. Gregory Rabassa (of Joăo de Melo's My World is Not of This Kingdom); that best-selling Portuguese novel became available to the English-speaking world through The Aliform Group in 2003.
"We're so glad to have given the world a sneak peak into Rabassa's wonderful translation, and just as glad to see an American small press jump in and take on this amazing project," says Sellman.
The anthology became one of the first electronic members of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) in 2001. Margin is also a member of the PEN USA Freedom to Write campaign and The Speculative Literature Foundation. Sellman and her staff seek to maintain a reputation for quality and comprehensiveness by nominating work from Margin contributors for the annual Pushcart Prize small press literary distinction.
MARGIN: Exploring Modern Magical Realism
