Issue Ten + Archive, our first book: OUT NOW
Issue Ten in print featuring Myles Zavelo, Mike Nagel, Andrew Siegrist, and Gil & Justin Vernon + a new retrospective book of the magazine’s 24-years history
Readers, we’re pleased to announce two new publications. Both are available right now in the shop and at all tour dates this spring.
LITTLE ENGINES ISSUE TEN includes fiction from MYLES ZAVELO and ANDREW SIEGRIST, an essay from MIKE NAGEL, and father/son duo GIL and JUSTIN VERNON’s first published poems. The issue was designed by HADLEY HENDRIX and features original paintings by KAMI BAERGEN. Issue Ten will be available free online next week for a limited time with the exception of Gil’s poem and one of Justin’s poems. Those are only available in print.
Little Engines Issue Ten
40 pages, full color
$12 (free shipping in the U.S.)
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We publish books now. Our first title is Archive: Selected Work, Issues One-Ten. This beautiful 334-page, full-color retrospective features select stories, essays, poems, and art from the magazine’s near-quarter century.
Archive includes work from HOLLY DAY, DAVID DRURY, SUSANNAH FELTS, BOB HICOK, ANDY JENKINS, WILL JOHNSON, DAMIEN JURADO, KARAN KAPOOR, LEXI KENT-MONNING, KEVIN MALONEY, FRAYN MASTERS, KEVIN MORBY, MIKE NAGEL, VIC NOGAY, EUN-HA PAEK, KYLE SEIBEL, GAURAA SHEKHAR, ANDREW SIEGRIST, LYNN STEGER STRONG, M.C. TAYLOR, ANGELA TOWNSEND, GIL VERNON, and JUSTIN VERNON.
Archive features MIKE NAGEL’s year-long column “The Unintentionalist” in full. Mike also wrote the book’s introduction, which you can read below.
334 pages, full color
$35 (free shipping in the U.S.)
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ARCHIVE: Selected Work, Issues One-Ten
Introduction by MIKE NAGEL
Recently, a writer named Brecht De Poortere published his annual ranking of literary journals. The list is surprisingly sophisticated and gets more sophisticated every year. It takes into account things like Pushcart nominations, Best American nods, social media followers, and all sorts of other data points and considerations that ultimately add up to me taking it somewhat seriously. On this year’s list, which includes some 1,126 literary magazines and publications, Little Engines ranked 742nd.
Little Engines showed up on my radar sometime around 2020 when Adam Voith reached out to see if I’d be interested in sending something to the magazine. I sent him a short essay about my teeth that ended up in Issue Six, alongside Lexi Kent-Monning, Gauraa Shekhar, and Sean Ennis, with art by Joan LeMay. The fact that this wasn’t Issue One was my first clue that this magazine might have been around longer than I realized. As it turned out, Little Engines is one of the originals, pre-dating Twitter¾nearly pre-dating the Internet¾and sharing a pedigree with the likes of McSweeney’s, Hobart, and many of the other punk-rock-minded literary institutions that created the lit mag mold we all know so well today, in a world where there are now at least 1,126 of these things, and probably many, many more.
That Little Engines has not managed to break the top 741 literary magazines in its impressive 20+ year tenure is a testament, I think, to the publication’s radical and undying commitment to being unsuccessful no matter the cost. And the cost, friends and readers, is high.
Each issue of Little Engines is full color, in print, featuring custom artwork and stickers. Plus, there’s the writing itself, which comes from some of the most exciting and notable writers working today (plus a few contributions, here and there, from myself), writing which the magazine pays to publish, all delivered via First Class USPS mail straight to your mailbox for the low, low price of zero dollars USD. I was at a book festival in Nashville last fall with Adam, helping work the Little Engines booth, when some woman asked him how he’s managed to keep the magazine free all these years.
“How does that work?” she said. “You know, as a business model?”
And Adam said: “It doesn’t.”*
I think that was the trip when Adam told me he was considering a new tagline for the magazine: Official Sponsor of the United States Postal Service since 2001.
In this archive—a sweeping retrospective of the magazine’s first 24 years—you’ll find writing from a wildly various set of writers, including legends like Frayn Masters, Kevin Maloney, and Bob Hicok. There are surprising contributions from musicians here—like Damien Jurado, Kevin Morby, and Justin Vernon—and some contributors who have become household names among the indie lit community, and I suspect will soon become household names period.
It’s hard for me to think of where these pieces would live if not in the pages of a literary magazine. These are not the type of pieces that are optimized for clicks. They’re not written to get shares or likes or retweets or pins or whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing these days. They’re not the type of pieces—and here I’m thinking of my own¾that would hold up to rigorous fact-checking. In other words, they’re not the type of pieces that successful magazines might publish, not without butchering them first.
And yet here they are, un-butchered, as timeless and exciting and readable as ever, which is what tends to happen when magazines treat good writing like what it is: honest-to-god, no-kidding art.
Maybe the reason Little Engines has stuck around so long—and why I imagine it will continue to stick around much longer still—is because it’s impossible to fail at something when success is beside the point.
Back at that book festival in Nashville, it was funny to watch people struggle to get their heads around this. A free magazine that existed for no other reason than the love of it. They thought there must be a catch. And there was, kind of. We’d hand them a second magazine and tell them that the catch was that they had to give one to a friend.
That day, a lot of people walked away from the booth smiling if a little confused, but you could tell some people got it right away. I’m thinking of this one kid in particular. A high school student. A weird poet, which must be a tough thing to be in Tennessee. They took every issue we had on the table. Then, a few hours later, they came back to chat with us again. Then, at the end of the day, they were back for the third time. We could tell they wanted to ask us something, and finally they worked up the courage to ask if the magazine ever took submissions. They told us, shyly, that there were a few poems they’d written recently, and they thought these ones might actually be pretty good. They’d been wondering where to send them.
— Mike Nagel, January 2025
*The free thing ends with Issue Ten. Sorry, held out as long as I could -AV
BUY ARCHIVE + LITTLE ENGINES ISSUE TEN IN THE SHOP
I received my physical copy of archive yesterday, and just wanted to let you know that I’m really loving it. Thanks for what you do.
So psyched I found this! Purchased. Appreciate all of you!