The Threepenny Review is an American literary magazine founded in 1980. It is published in Berkeley, California, by founding editor Wendy Lesser. Maintaining a quarterly schedule (March, June, September, December), it offers fiction, memoirs, poetry, essays and criticism to a readership of 10,000. Without the support of patrons or a university, the publication has an annual budget of $200,000.[1]
History
San Francisco's Fraenkel Gallery was the source for this 1939 Frank Navara photo, Coffee Pot, Ohio, featured on the cover of The Threepenny Review 83 (Fall 2000).
The magazine was launched in 1980[2] after Lesser (then 27 years old with no editing experience) was a guest editor of Ron Nowicki's San Francisco Review of Books. She found the experience so rewarding that she decided to create her own publication, and the first issue of The Threepenny Review appeared three months later.[3] She chose the title for its "obvious Brechtian overtones".[4] "The Threepenny Opera" is the title of one of Brecht's most famous works.
It sometimes features an essay symposium, as described by critic Deborah Mead in reviewing issue 104 (Winter 2006):
What sets The Threepenny Review apart from other little magazines is its cultural essays. A frequent feature of this journal is the symposium, a series of essays on a single topic. The essayists in this issue focus on plot, many writing to defend plot from its current disfavor, although Geoff Dyer chimes in to denigrate plot some more. Other essays tackle unexpected topics—music and pain, Dylan’s worst song, the placebo effect—with insight and lucidity.[5]
On June 16, 2006, Lesser created The Lesser Blog, an online spin-off for her own writing. A selection of various contributions to The Threepenny Review can also be read at the magazine's website.
