Salmagundi Magazine

  • Home
  • Salmagundi Magazine

Salmagundi Magazine An international quarterly founded in 1965 featuring fiction, poetry, and memoir by some of the world In short, Salmagundi is not a tame or genteel quarterly.

SALMAGUNDI is a quarterly of the Humanities and Social Sciences which is addressed to the “general” reader rather than to the academic specialist. Founded in 1965 and published since 1969 at Skidmore College, the magazine routinely publishes essays, reviews, interviews, fiction, poetry, regular columns, polemics, debates and symposia. It is widely regarded as one of the most influential intellectu

al quarterlies in the United States, and though it is often discussed as a “little magazine,” it is by no means predominantly belletristic or narrow in its purview or its audience. Among the writers long associated with Salmagundi are Nadine Gordimer, J.M Coetzee, Tzvetan Todorov, George Steiner, Orlando Patterson, Norman Manea, Christopher Hitchens, Seamus Heaney, Mary Gordon, Susan Sontag, Benjamin Barber, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Howard, Carolyn Forché, Martin Jay and David Rieff. For many years Salmagundi featured the work of the late American historian Christopher Lasch, who wrote the introduction to the tenth anniversary issue of the magazine in the fall of 1975. Lasch noted that, in Salmagundi, “the criticism of art and literature is informed at every point by analysis of the social, psychological, and political conditions that shape them.” He also noted that the magazine’s politics were difficult to define, that it often “criticized leftist cliches…from a point of view sympathetic to the underlying objectives of the left,” and that, though obviously attracted to the work of “iconoclastic” thinkers, it was often critical of “the counterculture.”

Obviously, the magazine has changed over the course of the past quarter century, but in many respects Lasch’s enthusiastic description remains accurate. The “mix” of material in the magazine is much what it has always been, the political perspectives various, the regular political and cultural columnists unpredictable in their sense of what matters, the presence in the “mix” of European voices (and sometimes Latin American and African voices) notable. As in the past, Salmagundi often devotes large parts of entire issues to “special subjects.” In the past ten years, two issues have been devoted to lengthy symposia on Afro-America, with contributors ranging all the way from Anthony Appiah and Darryl Pinckney to Jim Sleeper and Gerald Early. Other issues have been largely devoted to “The Culture of the Museum,” “Homosexuality,” “Art and Ethics,” “The Culture Industry,” “Kitsch” and “FemIcons.” From time to time, the magazine gives over its pages to debates, as between a leading thinker and his or her sometimes virulent critics. It invites argument, and it makes a place for literature that is demanding, including novella-length fiction—by Gordimer, Oates, Andrea Barrett, Steven Millhauser, Cynthia Ozick, and William Gass—and essays that—in terms of length and range of interest—go well beyond the fare served up by the better weeklies and monthlies. Forthcoming in Salmagundi are interviews with writers like Mario Vargas Llosa, Seamus Heaney and Adam Zagajewski; fiction by Nadine Gordimer, Joyce Carol Oates and Nancy Huston; regular columns by Tzvetan Todorov, Benjamin Barber, Carolyn Forché, Martin Jay, Mario Vargas Llosa and Marilynne Robinson; and a full-issue symposium (Spring 2005) on “Jihad, McWorld, Modernity: Public Intellectuals Debate the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ ” featuring Martha Nussbaum, Benjamin Barber, Akeel Bilgrami, Guity Nashat, Orlando Patterson, Breyten Breytenbach, Carolyn Forché, Vladimir Tismaneanu and James Miller with responses from Christopher Hitchens, Jean Bethke Elshtain and others. To subscribe to Salmagundi: https://www.skidmore.edu/salmagundi/subscriptions.php

In Memoriam Helen Vendler
25/04/2024

In Memoriam Helen Vendler

New Sal is out – Subscribe in our SHOP at salmagundi.skidmore.edu• On Israel and Gaza—Susie Linfield and David Stromberg...
24/04/2024

New Sal is out – Subscribe in our SHOP at salmagundi.skidmore.edu
• On Israel and Gaza—Susie Linfield and David Stromberg • Regina Janes on Hilary Mantel • Elizabeth Benedict on James Salter and Jewishness • Steve Stern: Again with Kafka • Phillip Lopate—Coming of Age in the Open Classroom • A Story by Joyce Carol Oates • Art: Donald Judd & Manet/Degas • Jay Rogoff on Balanchine • Jeffrey Meyers: Wounded Spirits of WWI • Poems by Mazur, Shapiro, Logan and others & More .e.purcell

Salmagundi friend and contributor Marilynne Robinson talks about her new book Reading Genesis
10/04/2024

Salmagundi friend and contributor Marilynne Robinson talks about her new book Reading Genesis

: Marilynne Robinson talks about her new book, Reading Genesis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), a new interpretation and analysis of the book of Genesis, in a conversation with author Ayana Mathis for the LIVE From NYPL series. at.pw.org/ReadingGenesis

"There is also, coming to the fore, a poetry genuinely consonant with our time, a poetry of spliced and collaged fragmen...
03/04/2024

"There is also, coming to the fore, a poetry genuinely consonant with our time, a poetry of spliced and collaged fragments, of mixed discourse systems, of narrative interrupting the lyric surface." — Marjorie Perloff, Salmagundi #67 (1985)

We're grateful, especially during National Poetry Month, to remember the work of Marjorie Perloff (1931-2024), prescient and brilliant critic and champion of experimental lyric poety who wrote for Salmagundi Magazine over many decades, most recently "Elegy as Tonic" about Peter Gizzi’s book Now It's Dark: https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/273-elegy-as-tonic

… it was just the crush of ghosts. That’s what I feel. And especially with the multimedia aspect, all the projections, a...
03/04/2024

… it was just the crush of ghosts. That’s what I feel. And especially with the multimedia aspect, all the projections, all those dead people behind me, even though I’ve sort of shifted more to beautiful home movies than a lot of the old war footage I used to put on the screen. And internment camp footage.
— Julian Saporiti of No-No Boy

Julian Saporiti's band No-No Boy [’s] … output is a largely self-generated suite of ballads having to do with being Asian American (Saporiti is Vietnamese American) and with the historical oppressions faced by Asian Americans. . . . Saporiti’s compositions feature startlingly deep engagements with historical narratives and the subjectivities that are occasioned by these. The songs are about people, I mean, in sometimes devastating circumstances, often finding moments of beauty, yearning, regret, even joy, amid the loss and grief…. In addition: a No-No Boy concert is often noteworthy for the great amount of historical film footage going on behind the musicians, too.
— Rick Moody

Read more in Rick Moody’s latest HOME KEY column
https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/499-the-home-key-14-you-ll-never-know-an-interview-with-julian-saporiti

“Pain is one of the great pleasures of reading Mantel.” — Regina Janes, forthcoming in the Spring-Summer issue of Salmag...
24/03/2024

“Pain is one of the great pleasures of reading Mantel.” — Regina Janes, forthcoming in the Spring-Summer issue of Salmagundi

In King’s terms, self-reliance as public action promises to bring about . . . a public realm in which individuals appea...
15/01/2024

In King’s terms, self-reliance as public action promises to bring about . . . a public realm in which individuals appear to each other, not as physical objects, but in all their personal dignity and worth.” — Anita Haya Goldman, “American Philosophy as Praxis: From Emerson and Thoreau to Martin Luther King,” Salmagundi #108 (Fall 1995)

Taking stock of the year and the fact that Russell Banks is no longer in this world, though his words remain:"A novelist...
12/12/2023

Taking stock of the year and the fact that Russell Banks is no longer in this world, though his words remain:

"A novelist writing is simply a person sitting alone in a room with his sentences, composing them by the thousands one at a time, learning from each new sentence that he writes what the next sentence will be. The novelist speaks for no one but himself and writes solely to pe*****te what would otherwise remain mysterious to him, morally or metaphysically or socially, or all three—mysterious and impenetrable, except by means of the silent, solitary act of writing a novel, this novel, the one at hand. And the very same conditions will prevail when, after finishing the novel, he sits down in his room and begins to write another."

--Russell Banks, in his Salmagundi column "In Transit," 2008

06/12/2023
I started to think of these pieces as small decolonial moments: salt crystallizes, thought crystallizes—so do ideas and ...
09/11/2023

I started to think of these pieces as small decolonial moments: salt crystallizes, thought crystallizes—so do ideas and epiphanies. And it’s interesting because salt is a healing property, but it’s also destructive.

— From “This Piece of Land That’s Breaking," our art columnist Barbara Purcell in conversation with Fernando Ruíz Lorenzo

https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/478-this-piece-of-land-thats-breaking

Hitchens recognized how easily an emphasis on identity can distort and even supplant the emphasis on politics. When univ...
09/11/2023

Hitchens recognized how easily an emphasis on identity can distort and even supplant the emphasis on politics. When universally intelligible ethical and political arguments become secondary to subjective feelings and attitudes, that’s an aspect of what Hitchens defined as identity politics.

— from Matt Johnson's new column, "Christopher Hitchens and the Necessity of Universalism" in the current issue of Salmagundi Magazine

https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/479-guest-column-christopher-hitchens-and-the-necessity-of-universalism

If despite the long labor of composition and the longer labor of revision I am still failing to be clear, what chance is...
09/11/2023

If despite the long labor of composition and the longer labor of revision I am still failing to be clear, what chance is there that, spontaneously, effortlessly, in the course of an interview, I will hit on the magic formula that will clear everything up?
— J.M. Coetzee in "The Summoning: An Interview" with Editor-in-Chief Robert Boyers in the new issue of Salmagundi Magazine
https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/articles/481-the-summoning

Nobel Prize

04/11/2023

New and essential work from William Deresiewicz in our latest issue and at https://salmagundi.skidmore.edu/

Art is useless, said Wilde. Art is for art's sake—that is, for beauty's sake. But why do we possess a sense of beauty to begin with? A question we will never answer. Perhaps it's just a kind of...

Address

Skidmore College North Broadway

12866

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Salmagundi Magazine posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Videos

Poetry Foundation & Poetry Magazine

Shortcuts

  • Address
  • Alerts
  • Videos
  • Claim ownership or report listing

  • Want your business to be the top-listed Media Company?

Share