Happy 241st birthday Nikolai Karamzin! Who is he? Yeah, I had to look him up, too. Apparently, he’s a Russian literary luminary turned historian. How did I find out about this individual, you ask? Why, in The Broadkill Review.
The Broadkill Review is a relatively new PDF/print journal out of Delaware. Definitely academic in nature, they mostly print poetry, but the few stories they publish are of good quality. There's a touching story about a struggling writer casually meeting a Polish painter who survived a concentration camp and a funny one about an older woman doing internet dating in Australia. There are also a few scholarly essays, though I confess to skipping over those for the most part.
They have a lot of information about the publishing world, including ads for other journals, competitions, conferences, calls for submissions (or papers), and updates on prize-winners.
What I really like is their literary birthdays feature (gee, could you tell?). Did you know Louisa May Alcott was born Nov. 29, 1832, or that Woody Allen was born Dec. 1, 1935? Here’s a few more:
John Milton Dec. 9, 1608
Jane Austen, Dec. 16, 1775
Rudyard Kipling Dec. 30, 1865
Francis Bacon, Jan. 22, 1561
Virginia Woolf, Jan. 25, 1882
Norman Mailer, Jan. 31, 1923
Looking through the complete list, I can’t help but wonder if the writer must be dead to be on it.
My only problem with the journal is the same one I have with all PDF journals: readability. I don’t want to print out 70 pages, especially when I wont read most of it (I skip most of the poetry), but I also don’t want to print selectively. However, reading the stories on the screen presents a problem since by the time you fit the whole page on the screen it’s too small to read. I highly dislike scrolling down to read and then scrolling back up again to read the next column, so it’s a lose-lose situation.
Basically, I have to bite my check and admit the actually minor hassles are worth it.
For more information about The Broadkill Review, email the_broadkill_review AT earthlink DOT net.