Egress is an ambitious new literary journal edited by David Winters and Andrew Lattimer, and it’s well worth the investment of your time. I reviewed the first issue for Splice:
In their brief preface to the first issue of Egress, the editors claim that we live in “a time of increasing distraction”, a time in which “conventional fiction can no longer detain our attention”, and that, as a result, “the future belongs to those strange outliers, those writers who bend and warp the medium into bold new shapes.” In the journal’s final pages, in an essay entitled ‘Attention and the Future of Narrative’, Veronica Scott Esposito elaborates on this notion: cataloguing fiction that “departs… from the conventions of storytelling” and “relentlessly resists systematization”, she celebrates literature that cannot be appreciated without “sustained focus”, “active attention”. Overall, then, Egress emerges from an aspiration to publish work of such linguistic and/or narrative novelty that the reader’s attention is warranted, held, challenged, and rewarded. How well has this aspiration been realised, now that the ink has dried on the page?
Infinite Patience 