The Believer
May 24th, 2007 by Ashley
& Nick Hornby
I was reading Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree at Border’s the other day. It’s a collection of his column “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns in The Believer. This is just what I’ve been looking for!
With the expiration of my The Economist subscription – I finally made up my mind not to pay $77 a year (man, it’s cheap…) for weekly Obituary feed, I wanna subscribe something that is rich in content in a way that interests me, ie. the likes of Business Week, OUT. I got a couple of issues of Punk Planet at Borders, but honestly, I’m more of a punk rock listener than a punk subculture follower. Punk Planet does provide insightful, underground, more or less aggressive, interesting reports, critics and stories; however, there are a number of things that I’m not familiar with and indifferent to. I thought about some literary magzines, such as book review or genre (mystery) magzines. But they all seem too much, too detailed, too rigid. The Believer 1) has Nick Hornby, a writer I love and hate, as one of their columnist, 2) based in San Francisco and 3) describes itself as
The Believer is a monthly magazine where length is no object. There are book reviews that are not necessarily timely, and that are very often very long. There are interviews that are also very long.
We will focus on writers and books we like.
We will give people and books the benefit of the doubt.
The working title of this magazine was The Optimist.
Sounds good, isn’t it? Still, I want to leaf through the real thing before I endorse my $45 to a year of subscription. (Then again, I sometimes have a meal of $45 and not even wink at all. orz)
btw, I got Lawrence Block’s newsletter yesterday and thus bought his book + audiotape on writing titled “Telling Lies for Fun and Profit”. It’s a spur of the moment thing…