The Believer Magazine
October 2009 issue, Vol. 7, No. 8. Cover illustration by Charles Burns. The cover depicts, clockwise from the upper left, Vlad Țepeş, Fidel Castro, Agnès Varda, and Jonathan Ames.
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| Editors | Heidi Julavits and Vendela Vida |
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| Categories | Literature |
| Frequency | 8 per year |
| First issue | March 2003 |
| Company | McSweeney's |
| Country | United States |
| Based in | San Francisco |
| Language | English |
| Website |
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The Believer is a bi-monthly magazine of interviews, essays, and reviews. Founded by the writers Heidi Julavits, Vendela Vida, and Ed Park in 2003, is a five-time finalist for the National Magazine Award, with contributors ranging from literary luminaries such as Hilton Als, Anne Carson, Nick Hornby, Susan Straight, and William T. Vollmann to emerging talents for whom the magazine has been a proving ground, including Eula Biss, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Leslie Jamison, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Kent Russell, and Rivka Galchen.
Since its founding, The Believer has been published by McSweeney’s, the independent press founded in 1998 by Dave Eggers. Eggers designed The Believer’s original design template. Park left The Believer in 2011, and Julavits and Vida continued to edit it.
First published in April 2003, the literary magazine was published in San Francisco by friends who planned to "focus on writers and books we like," with a nod to "the concept of the inherent Good." The print edition was initially published monthly. From late 2007 until September 2014, the print magazine came out 9 times per year, including annual Art, Music, and Film issues that sometimes featured a CD or DVD insert or other ephemera. In 2005, it was printing about 15,000 copies of its regular issues.
The Believer is a magazine, as its co-editor Heidi Julavits writes, that urges readers and writers to "reach beyond their usual notions of what is accessible or possible." The critic Peter Carlson praised the magazine’s essays as "highbrow but delightfully bizarre." Its book reviews may assess writers of other eras and interviews with writers, artists, musicians and directors often conducted by colleagues in their fields. Writing in The New York Times, A.O. Scott described the magazine as part of "a generational struggle against laziness and cynicism, to raise once again the banners of creative enthusiasm and intellectual engagement," noting its "cosmopolitan frame of reference and an eclectic internationalism," mixing pop genres with literary theory.Ploughshares editor Don Lee called it a "utopian literary magazine. This is the sort of thing everyone dreams of – having this quality of staff on board."
The magazine includes several feature essays in each issue but also draws on a stable of recurring features. Past and recurring columns include "Sedaratives," an advice column founded by Amy Sedaris that hosts a guest contributor every issue, such as Buck Henry, Eugene Mirman, and Thomas Lennon; "Stuff I've Been Reading" by Nick Hornby, a mixture of book discussion and musings; "Real Life Rock Top Ten: A Monthly Column of Everyday Culture and Found Objects," written by Greil Marcus; "What the Swedes Read", by Daniel Handler, which examines the work of Nobel Prize Winners; and "Musin's and Thinkin's," by Jack Pendarvis. All issues include a two-page, multi-color design feature called "Schema," whose theme has ranged from "Forensic Sketches of Literary Criminals" to "Habitats of Regional Burger Chains."
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