For this critique, I’ve decided to review the online literary journal anderbo

Style-wise, it seems pretty clear they must have been inspired by the McSweeney’s site. It has the same general minimalist style and thin centered column style. Also of note is that it doesn’t seem to have the traditional concept of “issues”, instead offering a single general index of fiction, poetry, non-fiction and photography.  As new stories are added they announce them on the main page. I think this is actually a really interesting approach, and it seems like the online literary journal is treated as an ongoing organic entity, as opposed to being rigidly broken up into issues. At the same time, the minimalist approach does seem to give it the “quality” of a printed journal… there isn’t any distracting advertising or even any distracting graphics or fancy design effects. This is something that works for McSweeney’s and seems to work for anderbo as well.

At the same time, looking through it, it does seem like something is perhaps lost by not having things broken out into issues. A printed literary journal releases usually on some sort of regular schedule (monthly, quarterly, annually, etc.) and usually this means that the editors are fairly specific in deciding what to print in each issue. A literary journal is more than just a collection of works, but is a whole in and of itself. Part of the flow of reading a literary journal is how the work is organized – how many short stories, how much art, how many poems? Are they all lumped together, or does the reader go from short story to poem to another story, etc? In the case of anderbo, there isn’t that kind of breakdown. From the main page you get links to fiction, poetry, “fact” and photography. From there you get a table of contents of, essentially, everything published under that category. You don’t even see dates, so you don’t know exactly when one work was published. This last part especially seems like an odd choice – it doesn’t seem like it would hurt to have the date, as well as some sort of timeline/index which could show you what was published each month. This could in fact even make up for not having traditional “issues”.

Fundamentally, in terms of the question of whether anderbo provides an effective platform for digital work, I would generally say yes. It’s design makes it clear that the work is the most important thing, and it makes it relatively easy to find. I think it is unfortunate that they completely abandon the notion of highlighting dates of publication, and it seems like it could be a problem years down the line as the single master “table of contents” becomes unwieldy. I think there is still room for the concept of “issues” even in an online literary journal. But these don’t detract from the general value of the journal itself. It makes it relatively easy to see everything published at once – I would say that the average reader would be more likely to browse through their master TOC’s than they would be to look through archives of virtual “issues”.

Would I want my work published in “anderbo”?  Sure, I could definitely say that. Just from reading through what they’ve already published, they seem to be quite legitimate, and I wouldn’t mind at all. I think I’d have to get used to the notion of telling someone “Hey, I’ve been published in ‘anderbo’…. just check out the Fiction table of contents for my name” but I think the online format clearly has its benefits – I can just send someone a link to the work.  I don’t have to expect someone to hunt down an elusive print copy, or some other complicated method.

I suspect that more literary journals will probably go down the same path…. and although I could see the concept of “issues” going away, I think indexes based on time and date (as well as other things like “most read”) could become valuable and standard features of online literary journals like this. It seems like other possibilities could be opened too, such as accepting more non-traditional material since it’s a purely online format (video, interactive works, etc.). And it does also seem like there could be room for things like having links under each work to point to a discussion thread for the story, so people could post their thoughts and questions, even talk with the writers.

I think that is really the next step – once a literary journal has accepted moving online, it seems like the ambition could and should be more than just replicating the concept of a printed journal.