The Believer is an American bimonthly magazine of interviews, essays, and reviews, founded by the writers Heidi Julavits, Vendela Vida, and Ed Park in 2003. The magazine is a five-time finalist for the National Magazine Award.
Between 2003 and 2015, The Believer was published by McSweeney's, the independent press founded in 1998 by Dave Eggers. Eggers designed The Believer's original design template. Park left The Believer in 2011, with Julavits and Vida continuing to serve as editors. In 2017, the magazine found a new home, moving from McSweeney's to the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute, an international literary center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
In October 2021, The UNLV College of Liberal Arts announced that the February/March 2022 issue of Believer would be the final issue published.[1] UNLV then sold the magazine to digital marketing company Paradise Media, which in turn sold it back to its original publisher, McSweeney's.[2]
The print edition was initially published monthly. From late 2007 until September 2014, the print magazine came out 9 times per year, including annual Art, Music, and Film issues that sometimes featured a CD or DVD insert or other ephemera.[5] In 2005, it was printing about 15,000 copies of its regular issues.[6]
Originally published by non-profit McSweeney's Publishing, The Believer was purchased by UNLV in 2017 with funding provided by philanthropist Beverly Rogers. In 2021, the editor-in-chief resigned and the funding for the magazine was withdrawn months later. After UNLV announced that the magazine would be shut down, it rejected an offer from McSweeney's to take back the publication and instead sold The Believer to digital marketing company Paradise Media. The change in ownership was announced by a tweet from a Paradise-owned website, the Sex Toy Collective. There was public criticism of the UNLV decision, including from Rogers, but the university spokesperson said it was "a sound business decision and the best step forward". Paradise responded to the criticism by working quickly with McSweeney's to restore ownership of the magazine to its original publisher.[2]
Description
The Believer is a magazine, as its co-editor Heidi Julavits wrote in 2003, that urges readers and writers to "reach beyond their usual notions of what is accessible or possible."[7] In 2004, the critic Peter Carlson praised the magazine's essays as "highbrow but delightfully bizarre."[8] Its book reviews may assess writers of other eras and interviews with writers, artists, musicians and directors often conducted by colleagues in their fields. In 2003, Ploughshares editor Don Lee called it a "utopian literary magazine. This is the sort of thing everyone dreams of – having this quality of staff on board."[4] Writing in The New York Times in 2005, A.O. Scott described the magazine as part of "a generational struggle against laziness and cynicism, to raise once again the banners of creative enthusiasm and intellectual engagement," noting its "cosmopolitan frame of reference and an eclectic internationalism," mixing pop genres with literary theory. "The common ground n+1 and The Believer occupy: a demand for seriousness that cuts against ingrained generational habits of flippancy and prankishness."[9]
Contents
The magazine includes several feature essays in each issue but also draws on a stable of recurring features. Past and recurring columns include "Sedaratives," an advice column founded by Amy Sedaris that hosts a guest contributor every issue, such as Buck Henry, Eugene Mirman, and Thomas Lennon; "Stuff I've Been Reading" by Nick Hornby, a mixture of book discussion and musings; "Real Life Rock Top Ten: A Monthly Column of Everyday Culture and Found Objects," written by Greil Marcus; "What the Swedes Read", by Daniel Handler, which examines the work of Nobel Prize Winners; and "Musin's and Thinkin's," by Jack Pendarvis. All issues include a two-page, multi-color design feature called "Schema," whose theme has ranged from "Forensic Sketches of Literary Criminals" to "Habitats of Regional Burger Chains."
Illustration
Illustrations and cartoons are featured throughout the magazine. Until late 2014, the cover illustrations for all regular issues were done by Charles Burns, while most of the other portraits and line drawings are by Tony Millionaire (following Gilbert Hernandez from the fifth issue on). Michael Kupperman's Four-Color Comics has appeared in many issues, and in most issues a series of images from a given artist or other source run as spot illustrations throughout the articles à la The New Yorker. The Believer debuted a comics section in the 2009 Art Issue, edited by Alvin Buenaventura, that includes strips by Anders Nilsen, Lilli Carré, Simon Hanselmann and Matt Furie. These comics are exclusive to the print edition of the magazine.
Book publishing and book awards
McSweeney's has published a number of books under The Believer Books imprint, such as Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree (2004), Housekeeping vs. The Dirt (2006), Shakespeare Wrote for Money (2008), and More Baths Less Talking (2012), collections of his "Stuff I've Been Reading" column. Other titles include Tom Bissell's Magic Hours (2012), Tamler Sommers's A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain (2009),[10] and anthologies of essays and interviews including Read Hard (2009) and Read Harder (2014), The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers (2008), Always Apprentices (2013), and Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence (2014).
Since 2005, the Believer Book Award is presented annually to novels and story collections the magazine's editors thought were the "strongest and most under-appreciated" of the year.[11] A shortlist and longlist are announced, along with readers' favorites, then a final winner is selected by the magazine's editors. In 2011, the Believer Poetry Award was inaugurated using the same model.[12] Since 2015, the editors' favorites book selections have been compiled and annotated on The Believer Logger.[13]
Controversy
As of May 2021 Joshua Wolf Shenk resigned as editor-in-chief of The Believer and as artistic and executive director of The Black Mountain Institute of The University of Nevada after reportedly exposing himself during a Zoom meeting.[14] Employees had accused him of previous inappropriate behavior.[15]
Notes
1 2 Maher, John (20 October 2021). "The 'Believer' Magazine Will Fold Next Year". Publishers Weekly. ISSN0000-0019. Archived from the original on 19 November 2021. Retrieved 15 April 2022. The Believer magazine will publish its final issue under the auspices of the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute (BMI), which is hosted by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) College of Liberal Arts, next year: Issue No. 139 is scheduled to be published in February/March of 2022. UNLV called the decision to kill the publication "part of a strategic realignment within the college and BMI as it emerges from the financial impact of the Covid-19 pandemic."
Nicholas Peter John Hornby is an English writer and lyricist. He is best known for his memoir Fever Pitch (1992) and novels High Fidelity and About a Boy, all of which were adapted into feature films. Hornby's work frequently touches upon music, sport, and the aimless and obsessive natures of his protagonists. His books have sold more than 5 million copies worldwide as of 2018. In a 2004 poll for the BBC, Hornby was named the 29th most influential person in British culture. He has received two Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay nominations for An Education (2009), and Brooklyn (2015).
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Vendela Vida is an American novelist, journalist, editor, screenplay writer, and educator. She is the author of multiple books, has worked as a writing teacher, and is a founder and editor of The Believer magazine.
Darin Strauss is a best-selling American writer whose work has earned a number of awards, including, among numerous others, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Strauss's 2011 book Half a Life, won the 2011 NBCC Award for memoir/autobiography. His most recent book, The Queen of Tuesday, came out in August, 2020. It is currently nominated for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize.
Heidi Suzanne Julavits is an American author and was a founding editor of The Believer magazine. She has been published in The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2, Esquire, Culture+Travel, Story, Zoetrope All-Story, and McSweeney’s Quarterly. Her novels include The Mineral Palace (2000), The Effect of Living Backwards (2003), The Uses of Enchantment (2006), and The Vanishers (2012). She is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University. She is a recipient of the PEN New England Award.
Pattiann Rogers is an American poet, and a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. In 2018, she was awarded a special John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry.
Peter Orner is an American writer. He is the author of two novels, two story collections and a book of essays. Orner holds the Professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and was formerly a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. He spent 2016 and 2017 on a Fulbright in Namibia teaching at the University of Namibia.
Joshuah Bearman is an American journalist. He has written for Rolling Stone, Harper's, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and McSweeney's, and contributes to This American Life. Bearman was a contributing producer on the documentary, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. Bearman is an advisory board member of 826LA, a non-profit tutoring organization in Los Angeles. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
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