Vice Magazine’s 2nd Annual Fiction Issue
Vice is a favorite of mine. Yeah, it’s a hipster title, which means it can be hit or miss. But they’ve been pushing boundaries for over 10 years and still don’t feel stale. If you can put out a beautiful magazine that long, I’ll favorite you, too.
Vice is getting a lot of attention lately for VBS.tv, its new video site, and of course its requisite blog. But this is The Magazineer, and we like magazines, so when I saw a new stack appear outside of Villains on Haight Street, I grabbed a copy.
Their latest issue (volume 14, number 12) was their Second Annual Fiction Issue, and it’s a doozy. Almost 200 pages printed on heavy matte stock. The stories are wild, as always, and some seem more like true personal narrative than straight-up fiction. (Tao Lin’s “Shoplifting from American Aparel” would have fit in quite nicely in Fray’s upcoming Busted issue, but I digress.)
I loved how many of the stories had a personal preface by the author. They ranged from self-depreciating (“‘Does this story make you hate and want to kill me?’”) to serious (“I have been working on this novel for more than ten years.”) but they all set a personal tone to even the weirdest fiction.
Of interest to my fellow Magazineers would be the interview with Gary Fisketjon on editing famous writers like Raymond Carver and Bret Easton Ellis, and the interview with Dennis Cooper on Little Caesar, a groundbreaking literary journal that started in ‘76. I also loved the interviews with the Asssscat improv group (many of whom you’d recognize from 30 Rock and SNL).
If I had to scrape up something negative to say, it’d be that the cover feels phoned-in. It’s just black type on white, a simple listing of all the contributor names in the issue. It’s nice to give cred to the people in the issue, but combined with the width of the issue, it just makes it look like a large-type phone book with the cover missing.
The issue is packed with ads, as usual, but it seems like a fair trade, given the cover price (free). The advertisers are all targeted, too, which helps. There are also some goodies (a poster from Rock Band and some weird faux hair from Scion) which are novel but impede the page-flipping.
Those are small quibbles with a book that I can tell already will live on my coffee table for a good long time.
Further Reading: You can see more photos or read some of the stories from this issue, or download PDFs of previous issues. Wikipedia has a brief summation of the history of Vice Magazine, natch. You can also subscribe here.
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