What’s seventeen years in internet years? Four thousand platform migrations, twelve dead social networks, three algorithmic regime changes, and one very long CAPTCHA proving you’re still human?
Anyway, seventeen years ago, I launched Big Other as “an online forum of iconoclasts and upstarts focusing its lens on books, music, comics, film, video and animation, paintings, sculpture, performance art, and miscellaneous nodes and sonic booms”; and the award-winning journal has far exceeded my hopes and expectations (though longevity itself is a peculiar measure of success in a culture that continually compels us to mistake visibility for value, circulation for consequence, and the incessant production of new things for the creation of anything worth keeping). I often marvel at how an engagingly weird of piece of writing is a vibrant vibrating multiplicity, at the many ways an encounter with an unfamiliar work can rearrange a reader’s sense of what literature might be doing, and the strange persistence of objects and projects that survive largely because people decide, again and again, that they are worth sustaining.
I’ve always been drawn to writing that nicks the skin of the sensible, that makes the world we’ve settled for slip, snag, and shiver; writing that worries the supposedly clear pane of language, that picks at the seams between genres, writing where language’s familiar floorboards flex and fissure underfoot, until they give way and fall and suddenly you’re on your way to “No way!” A well-tempered sentence or fractured narrative or peculiar image or an unexpected conjunction of ideas can do this; and oh how marvelous it is to encounter a work whose apparent strangeness gradually reveals how subversive artistic form can produce knowledge that our established vocabularies and explanatory systems have trouble understanding let alone accommodating!
Big Other has published superb literary art by a host of stellar writers, including Pulitzer Prize winners Rae Armantrout and Forrest Gander, National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky, National Book Award winner and current U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze, Grand Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy Samuel R. Delany, American Book Award winner Edwin Torres, Charles Bernstein, Robert Coover, Elaine Equi, Rick Moody, Lance Olsen, Cole Swensen, and many others.
In 2026, Big Other continued its commitment to publish adventurous writing that defamiliarizes ways of seeing, thinking, and reading, bringing together literary artists whose work knowingly and unknowingly tests and reveals the possibilities of language, form, and imagination.
The journal this year has offered an especially rich array of contributions, from poetry by Martine Bellen, Gillian Cummings, Timothy Donnelly, Rachel Galvin, Ann Lauterbach, Karen An-hwei Lee, Sylvia Legris, Heller Levinson, Jennifer Maritza McCauley, Michael Lee Rattigan, Elizabeth Robinson, Rodrigo Toscano, and Kathryn Weld, to fiction by Edie Meidav and Stephen O’Connor, nonfiction by Eleni Sikelianos, criticism by Angus Stewart and Richard Hamilton, and an interview with Peter Markus by Elijah Sparkman. We also continued our podcast, Jamming Their Transmission, with Episode 21, a conversation with visual artists about painting and interconnectedness.
Books Published in 2026 Featuring Work First Published in Big Other:
In 2026, thirteen books featuring work originally published in Big Other were subsequently published by an extraordinary range of independent and university presses. These include Rae Armantrout’s Safe Rooms (Wesleyan University Press), Kim Chinquee’s Octopus Arms (MadHat Press), Andrew Joron’s Lunagrad (Anti-Oedipus Press), Karen An-hwei Lee’s Marimo, Mon Amour (FC2), Lance Olsen’s An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies (Dzanc Books), Aimee Parkison’s Body of Evidence (Unbound Edition Press), Kathryn Rantala’s Translated from the English (Sandy Press), Luis Othoniel Rosa Animal Spiral (Charco Press) (translated by Katie Marya), Eleni Sikelianos’s Memory Rehearsal (City Lights Books), Lisa Russ Spaar’s Soul Cake (Persea Books), Cole Swensen’s Veer (Alice James Books), Marc Vincenz’s No More Animal Poems (White Pine Press), and Best Microfiction 2026 (Pelekinesis).
These afterlives are among the deep delights of editorial work: a piece replicates, finds itself elsewhere, altered but still itself, bearing traces of its former life while taking on new lives, new luster, new meanings. But isn’t all art like this, all great art, anyway, viz., forever in transit, crossing contexts, accruing echoes, its reverberations reaching places no one could have foreseen?
In any case, this ecology is materially precarious. Literary community doesn’t run on goodwill alone, any more than a journal runs on beautiful sentences, much as I wish they had! Books need publishers; writers need readers; websites need servers; and the work of making connections, editing, publishing, and preserving an archive takes time and money. We romanticize literary community at our peril when we forget its material conditions.
So buy these books! Read them attentively! Review them, teach them, recommend them, interview their authors, ask your bookstore or library to acquire them, attend a reading, or give a copy to someone who might find it illuminating! These gestures can seem modest beside the structural problems facing independent publishing; and they are modest, but they also constitute a vital practical praxis and politics of attention and authentic connection.
Celebrating the Work, Sustaining the Writers:
In 2019, I launched the annual Big Other Book Awards to recognize excellence in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and translation, along with a Readers’ Choice Award and honors for lifetime achievement and outstanding service to the literary community. On June 14, 2026, I hosted the ceremony for the 2025 Big Other Book Awards, celebrating literature published that year and the writers and presses whose work sustains an adventurous literary ecology.
Speaking of awards, Big Other itself has received recognition through The Best American Poetry, The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, the British Science Fiction Association, Entropy, and Wigleaf. Among the works published in Big Other that subsequently received recognition are Kimberly Ann Lyons’s “Coffee with Lavender,” selected for The Best American Poetry 2023; Tina May Hall’s “The Extinction Museum #506: Home Pregnancy Test, c. early 2000s,” selected for Best Microfiction 2023; and several pieces selected for The Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s annual list of notable short fiction. Paul Kincaid’s four-part “Blogging the Hugos: Decline” won the 2010 British Science Fiction Association Award for Nonfiction.
I’m grateful to the editors, judges, publishers, and readers who have helped this work travel. Such recognition can make a genuine difference, especially for writers and presses working outside the most powerful circuits of literary attention.
Over the years, I’ve published many folios and anthologies, each creating its own constellation of voices, affinities, and provocations, though I remain especially proud of Puerto Rican Writers Folio: A Hauntology, which I published in 2022. Bringing together an extraordinary range of writers whose work engages the histories, presences, and imagined futures of Puerto Rican experience, the folio considers how the past inhabits the present, how cultural memory persists through rupture and displacement, and how literature might summon possibilities that dominant historical narratives leave obscured. Introducing the folio, I described it as “a kind of phantasmagoria, a haunting of various embodiednesses and dismemberments,” an active remembering and re-membering that disturbs the peace of the contemporary.
On the Work of Dissensus:
In 2023, I launched Subversity (on hiatus now, alas), Big Other’s online para-academy, as a “community of dissensus” devoted to the collective examination of experimental and innovative writing. Its seminars combine a ninety-minute discussion of a recently published book with an hour-long question-and-answer session with the author. The inaugural lineup included Rae Armantrout, Daniel Borzutzky, Arthur Sze, and Edwin Torres, among other great writers.
Big Other’s podcast, Jamming Their Transmission, extends these encounters into another medium, featuring conversations with writers including Rikki Ducornet, Samuel R. Delany, Debra Di Blasi, Norman Lock, Dawn Raffel, Eugene Lim, and William Lessard. Its title suggests interference with established channels of transmission, but also the pleasures of improvisation, of listening closely enough for a conversation to move somewhere its participants couldn’t have predicted.
Literary Citizenship and the Myth of the Independent Genius:
One of the most generous things a writer can do is help another writer find readers: a review, a recommendation, a thoughtful conversation, a classroom discussion, or an invitation to participate in an event can extend the life of a work in ways that are difficult to predict.
Speaking of which, many writers have been extraordinarily generous in describing Big Other and my work as its editor, and their words speak to the many dimensions of a glorious endeavor that’s always been as much about cultivating relationships as publishing individual works. Lance Olsen has called Big Other “one of the very best online innovative arts & culture magazines out there,” while Rick Moody has praised its willingness to push the boundaries of what writing can do. Samuel R. Delany has celebrated the journal’s longevity; and Andrew Joron has described it as “a vital source of innovative writing.” Lyn Di Iorio, writing about the risks Big Other takes and the quality of the work it publishes, has also praised the care I bring to editing, presentation, and helping writers find readers. Others have spoken more directly to the labor and sensibility behind the journal: Norman Lock has recognized my commitment to literary fiction and the ideas that good writing generates; Peter Markus has praised my attention to the individual sentence and what he calls “such crucial listening”; and David Naimon has described my efforts to nurture a literary ecosystem in which writers’ work exists in conversation rather than competition. Edie Meidav has called me “a holy enthusiast,” a lighthouse illuminating neglected corners of the literary world, while Laurie Stone, David Hollander, and Dawn Raffel have recognized my commitment to writers whose work deserves a wider readership. Harold Abramowitz has described me as a conversation starter, a reader for whom reading is an art and a practice; Janice Lee has praised my advocacy for small-press literature; and Gary Amdahl has offered a particularly moving account of Big Other as an emphatically social endeavor, a community of minds, ideas, and work that challenges the mythology of the independent genius.
I’m deeply grateful for these words, to say the least. I also recognize that whatever Big Other has accomplished depends on the people who have contributed their work, read and/or discussed and/or challenged it, and helped it circulate within the rhizomatic networks, digital and otherwise.
Seventeen Years and Counting:
Longevity offers no guarantee of permanence. Actually, nothing guarantees permanence, but that’s another story! In any case, this work, vital as it is, requires resources. Which is to say, there is, alas, no secret treasury underwriting this enterprise, no golden institutional apparatus humming behind the curtain. Big Other is a concerned one-person concern running on a (left) wing and a (secular) prayer. There’s me, a website, an archive that has grown magnificently beyond its keeper’s expectations, a steady influx of extraordinary writers and artists, and the recurrent revelation that servers cost money.
So if you’ve found something on Big Other over the years that stayed with you—a poem, story, essay, interview, review, piece of criticism, work of art, or some wonderfully wayward hybrid—I hope you’ll consider making a birthday donation.
Your donation helps with the prosaic business that permits the improbable business: keeping the site alive, publishing new work, maintaining the archive, and getting more experimental fiction, poetry, essays, hybrid work, criticism, interviews, and art into the world.
Whether you give $5, $10, $25, $50, $100, $500, $1,000, or more, your support will help ensure that Big Other continues to publish fiction, poetry, art, hybrid works, reviews, essays, interviews, and more in 2026 and beyond.
And money is only one form of currency. Share something from the site. Send someone Big Other Anthology 2025. Tell a writer about Big Other. Tell a reader. Pass along this appeal.
Big thanks to everyone who’s contributed to Big Other over these seventeen years: to the writers who have entrusted me with their work, the readers who have given it their attention, the translators who have opened passages between languages, the editors and publishers who have helped it find new homes, and the many people whose reviews, conversations, and acts of encouragement have extended its reach!
And here’s to Big Other at seventeen—and to whatever strange, unruly thing comes next!
(Image: Julie Mehretu’s Stadia II (2004))
