Five years ago we released our first emerging writers issue to highlight New England Review’s commitment to discovery and openness to writers whose work is still largely unknown. We included emerging translators among them, with the understanding that translation is another form of imaginative writing and thinking, one that this magazine has been committed to from the beginning. While every issue includes new writers, a dedicated issue gave us a chance to gather their work together and make some noise about it. On the other hand, one of the pleasures of New England Review has always been the way that new and established writers come together, how a new poet might share a table of contents with one of their poetry heroes, or a teacher and student may appear side by side, purely by accident. So with this double issue we decided to have it both ways: It is both an emerging writers issue, with a full two hundred pages dedicated to discovery, and a “regular” issue of NER, where experienced writers and translators have found a home for their newest work. The result is this spectacular new volume, with its thick spine and swirling cover art, which we hope will offer enough color and light to see you through the long winter ahead.

Selecting all of this work is the result of endless cycles of reading by people who care deeply about it. Our staff readers and editors listen to each piece, and to each other, often disagreeing but always looking for something that offers up its own truth through a marriage of form, language, content, and idea. One of NER’s most dedicated practitioners of this kind of reading has been fiction editor Ernest McLeod, who began reading for the magazine in 1998 and has continued off and on since then, making the case for a remarkable variety of stories, including several in this issue. This double issue is his last as a fiction editor, and we already miss his insight and warmth, his patience and wisdom. At the same time we’re happy to bring new fiction editor Maggie Su on board. She brings a strong sense of possibility for what fiction can do—how it can surprise and enchant us, break its own rules, and ask the difficult questions.

While dedicated emerging writers issues are a relatively recent feature, in the tenth anniversary edition of NER, published in 1987, the editors wrote that the magazine has always “conceived its mission to be above all the support and cultivation of writers not yet canonized by literary opinion. . . . While we have had the immense pleasure of publishing the likes of Robert Penn Warren, Jorge Luis Borges, Ann Beattie, Richard Hugo, Galway Kinnell, or Joyce Carol Oates, we have also refrained almost entirely from soliciting materials for publication. It is accurate, and may even be conservative, to say that 99 1/2 percent of our contents over the years has been material that simply arrived (in a throng of company) by mail.”

This all still rings true, except the part about the mail. Now, instead of receiving a throng of a thousand or so submissions on paper between September and May, we now get nearly 10,000 submissions a year through our online portal, remaining open for just several weeks twice a year. And while we haven’t yet seen the proliferation of AI-generated submissions in the queue, it seems only a matter of time. How many of us would it take to read the submissions then, and who would want to do it? This is not the place for yet another screed for or against artificial intelligence, but I’m going to venture to say that New England Review will remain, as far as it’s possible, an AI-free zone. We’ll adapt as necessary, but if reading and writing are turned over to machines, our purpose here would come to an end.
Speaking of technology, that tenth anniversary issue of NER also featured a “Symposium on the Writer and the Computer” and included Wendell Berry’s essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” which was subsequently published in Harper’s Magazine’s Readings column (and mistakenly attributed to that magazine ever since). This two-page essay stirred up enough outrage and support that it, along with a handful of those responses, has gone on to be republished multiple times as a book, most recently in 2021 by Penguin, now nearly forty years after the initial storm. By all accounts, Berry has still not purchased a computer. “I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work,” he wrote in 1987.

Before you turn to the writers here, emerging and otherwise, and read the words likely composed on and at the very least distributed by means of a computer—though not, as far as I know, using artificial intelligence—here are a few more words about new technology from the current issue’s Rediscovery, related by Alphonse de Lamartine in 1854 and concerning events four hundred years prior. “Men will arise of powerful and attractive minds but of proud and corrupt hearts,” a voice says to John Gutenberg as he is about to share his invention of movable type. “Without thee, they would have remained in darkness, and confined to a narrow circle, doing evil only to their neighbors and in their own time. By thy means they will bring madness, misfortune, and crime upon all men and all ages!”
If it’s human nature to do evil and also to do good, so too are the uses of our inventions. Maybe AI is not going to bring the end times for humanity any more than the printing press did, though I still will not use it. In any case, and in any format, this magazine invites you to read like a human—to be animate, compassionate, vulnerable, and wise.

—CK

Subscribe to Read More