Fiction Magazines Worth Reading

It's been just over a year since I posted about the fiction magazines I felt were still worth reading, and already two magazines I liked (Farrogo's Wainscot and the not-mentioned-but-should-have-been Lone Star Stories) have gone out of business. Since then, I've also read a lot more widely, discovering new venues. Given that these things may continue to happen, it seemed appropriate enough to turn the list into a yearly outing. There's a glut of completely unreadable fiction magazines out there (with the "literary" magazines tending toward tepid boredom and the genre magazines tending toward uninspired hack-work), and the world sorely needs someone to sort through them and pick out the ones that are actually worth paying attention to.

Not so long ago, I despaired at the idea of finding a place to publish my own fiction. Like many aspiring writers, I flipped through Writer's Market and sent stuff out to the supposed top of the short story food chain, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, etc., with predictable results (that is, rejection). But then why should I have been surprised? I didn't generally like the stories published in those magazines (they are usually, shall we say, boring). Even if I was writing the best possible stories I could in the style I liked (and I definitely wasn't) I probably wouldn't have been published in those venues. With this in mind, I set out to find short story publications that I could actually read regularly and enjoy. This is the list I've come up with (so far) in alphabetical order, though I more than welcome recommendations: