SANTA MONICA REVIEW. This unadorned yet attractive...

SANTA MONICA REVIEW. This unadorned yet attractive magazine publishes fiction and poetry. The editorial strategy is to alternate a poet with a fictioneer; since some of the stories are longer ones, the weighting of pages is heavily in favor of fiction. The poetry is consistently of high quality. The fiction, too, is well-crafted, though it rarely strays far from contemporary realism or lyrical psychologism.

Santa Monica Review could be said to provide a well-edited and intelligent casebook of today’s mainstream poetry and fiction. Once in awhile an oddball item will pop up, such as Michael Roloff’s thoroughly eccentric but entertaining meditation on Peter Handke in the Fall 1990 issue. The balance between known and unknown writers, between poetry and fiction, and the unusual lack of interviews, art, or other differently apprehended material, all help to make Santa Monica Review a literary magazine you might be likely to read straight through.

SANTA MONICA REVIEW, Santa Monica College, 1900 Pico Boulevard, Santa Monica, CA 90405; $6 per issue, $10 for two issues.)