"Highbrow but delightfully bizarre"

July 31, 2018 9:06 AM

The Believer, a five-time National Magazine Award finalist, is a bimonthly literature, arts, and culture magazine based at the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, Nevada. In each issue, readers will find journalism, essays, intimate interviews, an expansive comics section, poetry, and on occasion, delightful and unexpected bonus items. Our poetry section is curated by Jericho Brown, Kristen Radtke selects our comics, and Joshua Wolf Shenk is our editor-in-chief. All issues feature a regular column by Nick Hornby and a symposium, in which several writers expound on a theme of contemporary interest.

I just discovered this magazine via Open Culture, and can't wait to explore. They have this to say:

"Founded in 2003, The Believer magazine gained a reputation for being an off-beat literary magazine with a commitment “to journalism and essays that are frequently very long, book reviews that are not necessarily timely, and interviews that are intimate, frank and also very long.” Founded by authors Vendela Vida, Ed Park and Heidi Julavits, and originally published Dave Eggers' McSweeney's, The Believer has featured contributions by Nick Hornby, Anne Carson, William T. Vollmann; columns by Amy Sedaris and Greil Marcus; and also interviews--like this one where director Errol Morris talks with filmmaker Werner Herzog.

"Now published by the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, The Believer has entered a new era. It has launched a brand new web site and made its 15-year archive freely available online. It's a first for the publication. Enter the archive of the "highbrow but delightfully bizarre" magazine here."

posted by QuakerMel (16 comments total)

Metafilter: highbrow but delightfully bizarre.
posted by QuakerMel at 9:07 AM on July 31, 2018 [4 favorites]

Wow! This is great. Believer has been one of my favorite culture & arts magazines for a long time, second only to Cabinet. One of the better things to come out of McSweeny's (which is all a little too twee for me). I thought I'd never get to read some of the back issues, so it's wonderful to see this archive made public.
posted by dis_integration at 9:11 AM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]

I could have sworn The Beleiver had been linked a bunch of times, but looks like only 5 before. It's a routine read for me, love it.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:18 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

I remember this Gary Gygax/D&D profile being pretty good.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:21 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

I love the Believer! Sometimes I'm annoyed by what feels like a certain white, upper class slant, but every time I've read it there's been something interesting. If anything, I think some of their writing has actually gotten better over time - the last issue I saw seemed to have branched out into more global reporting, like what Vice could be if it weren't run by dudebros.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 9:49 AM on July 31, 2018 [2 favorites]

I was a subscriber for The Believer for a two year period but it started to get kind of expensive so I stopped. This is great, I can now go back and fully dive in. There's so much good writing happening in this section of McSweeney's. So I'm quite pleased with the announcement.

Huzah!
posted by Fizz at 10:13 AM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

Dunno if it's PepsiBlue, but only mentioning it because the store supports a non-profit I've worked and volunteered with for a long time: If anybody wants physical copies/back issues of The Believer (there's one that came with a cassette), the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co. has a whole bunch we got stored and on shelves (probably some old McSweeney's collections too if you're looking for that).
posted by kkokkodalk at 10:15 AM on July 31, 2018

God this makes me feel old - I was working at an indie bookstore in Berkeley when The Believer came out, and it was the biggest deal since, well McSweeney's.

For me it seemed to perfectly exemplify the kind of writing white Bay Area book club liberals got effusive about, like Michael Chabon or . . . really just pick a name from the "contributions" lineup above.

Because of that and a general ambivalence to Dave Eggers I never really gave it a fair shake. I'll have to dig in a little.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:06 PM on July 31, 2018 [3 favorites]

For me it seemed to perfectly exemplify the kind of writing white Bay Area book club liberals got effusive about, like Michael Chabon or . . . really just pick a name from the "contributions" lineup above.

I'm a subscriber and this is emphatically so, but every few issues they have something that's really fascinating or knocks it out of the park (a few recent examples are Susana Ferreria's exploration of Pentecostalism in Haiti or this long conversation between Paul Beatty and Viet Thanh Nguyen.) The last issue pointed me to Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad, which I might have missed otherwise.

It can be irritating and self-indulgent, but also smart and surprising - qualities I associate with fewer and fewer general interest magazines these days. It's worth taking a chance on.
posted by ryanshepard at 12:31 PM on July 31, 2018 [2 favorites]

What a treasure – I have a big stack of Believer back issues that I'll never part with. They're full of wonderful nonfiction and the interviews are really worth reading. Looking forward to digging through this!

"I never want a fight [...] It's almost all you hear, but it always embarrasses me because when people are fighting they say things they don't mean. I want people to say things they mean, and I want them to make meaning in the course of the conversation. I like significance. I like resonant significance, and I don't like snap or flash judgements. What's more, 99.5% of my guests are not criminals or politicians. They're not people who've committed crimes or disappointed public trust. They don't need to be interrogated. They need to be taken on a beautiful walk or ramble."
—from a 2010 interview with Michael Silverblatt, host of Bookworm on KCRW

posted by oulipian at 12:43 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

Susana Ferreria's exploration of Pentecostalism in Haiti

See that's really interesting. Also at a decade's remove "the kind of writing white Bay Area book club liberals got effusive about" doesn't raise my gorge nearly as much as it did when I was in the thick of it.
posted by aspersioncast at 12:58 PM on July 31, 2018

Huh, interesting that they've changed publishers to the U of Nevada. They slid from monthly (in the 2003 beginnings) to 'kinda semi-monthly, but maybe more like quarterly' as you can see from their archive issue dates... Wonder if they'll publish more often as a result? They've always been great, though. Their write-up of the church of satan in upstate new york a couple years back was pure gold...
posted by kaibutsu at 2:03 PM on July 31, 2018

For several years, The Believer also had portraits done for the cover by the great Charles Burns of Black Hole fame.
posted by benzenedream at 3:12 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

So happy this is up! I only wrote for them once, but it's one of my favorite things I've ever written, and the credit is really due to Heidi Julavits, the editor at the time. She asked me "Do you want to write an essay about books about mountain climbing and books about the Riemann Hypothesis?" and I said I thought that was a weird idea but she said "Just try it" and I read the books and it totally made sense and I was like, Heidi, can I also include some stuff about competitive hot-dog eating? and she was like, go for it, we're the Believer, we do as we like, and, well, there's the piece.
posted by escabeche at 7:05 PM on July 31, 2018 [7 favorites]

evil otto introduced me to The Believer with this fpp, and the linked piece, "If He Hollers Let Him Go: Searching for Dave Chappelle ten years after he left his own show," by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, stands out in my memory as an excellent bit of writing.
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:19 PM on July 31, 2018 [1 favorite]

And site searching for believermag.com returns 89(!) posts.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:51 PM on August 1, 2018 [1 favorite]