Friday's Frequently Overlooked: Our (Paper and Ink) Fiction Magazines

The three or seven people who look at this blog regularly already know that I'm a fool for fiction magazines. I've been reading them, at first spottily, for essentially all my literate life (my earliest reading memories include a DC comic and what was probably either an Ultimate Publications or Popular Library [the 1960s Wonder Stories or its successor] pulp-magazine-fiction reprint magazine, and scattered issues of Children's Digest, Humpty Dumpty and Hightlights followed soon after), and consistently since (finally) discovering where I could buy new issues of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in December, 1977 (having been tempted to invest the Whole Dollar in an issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in late 1975, when my comics still cost a quarter, and the quarters weren't that common [I did manage to scrape up a dollar for a National Lampoon about then, much to my mother's disapproval]).

So, in these days of circulation falling for all sorts of magazines, and the continuing collapse of the remaining decent newsstands (even in the big-box bookstore chains, themselves struggling to survive), giving the current crop a try is worth considering...there's a Real Good chance that a post here is only preaching to the converted, but in the off chance that any of this is useful and/or new information...and these are only the items that I believe to be still publishing and which are not solely webzines, or even webzines which are getting some best-of anthologies published in book form. Though of course all or nearly all of these have some web presence today...and some of the better magazines, such as Subterranean and Fantasy Magazine, have gone web-only after a run as paper-and-ink publications with at least some limited newsstand presence. And in each category below, my suggestions are not exhaustive (though in crime fiction they might well be close).

The Crime Fiction Magazines:
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine
The Strand Magazine
Crimewave
Hardboiled
Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine
Out of the Gutter

Prose Humor (even if the first is much more widely-read online, and the second is largely, not completely, cartoon-oriented):
The Onion
Funny Times
Mustard
Private Eye

Fantastic Fiction/Speculative Fiction Magazines (a very imcomplete list):
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Weird Tales
Cemetery Dance
Realms of Fantasy
Black Gate
Black Static
On Spec
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet
Electric Velocipede
Shroud
Asimov's Science Fiction
Analog Science Fact and Fiction
Interzone
Albedo One
Postscripts
Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine
Space and Time
Shimmer
Dark Horizons

Eclectic/Contemporary Mimetic Fiction Magazines (a very, very, incomplete list, heavily weighted toward the ones I see and read most often):
Zoetrope All-Story
Black Clock
Tin House
Alaska Quarterly Review
Conjunctions
Boulevard
A Public Space
Iowa Review
Pleiades
Southwest Review
Ploughshares
Fiction
Epoch
The Antioch Review
PGS: Philippine Genre Stories
McSweeney's
Rosebud
The Paris Review
Glimmer Train

Western and other historical fiction, and romance and erotica (and other sports!):
While there have been a number of western (most impressively Louis L'Amour's Western Magazine) and romance titles (Five Great Romances ran for about a decade) over the last thirty years (one newish romance title was publishing last year, but I haven't seen it since), and there have been even a couple of wider-ranging historical fiction and adventure-fiction magazines (Paradox recently became web-only), there are no non-virtual magazines of these stripes currently publishing that I'm aware of. Romance, particularly, is heavily invested in three-novella and other anthologies. Erotica, which had a number of non-virtual literary magazines going a decade or so ago (ranging from Yellow Silk to Paramour to Blue Blood to Libido) seems to have shrunken, in the cold bath of the current climate, to Penthouse Letters and perhaps a few straggling imitators which I never see. The most prominent sports fiction magazine, baseball review Elysian Fields Quarterly, has not returned from its planned and possibly permanent hiatus begun in 2009.

See Patti Abbott's blog for the roundup of Friday's Forgotten Books