5 June 2017
ABOUT A DOZEN YEARS AGO a friend of mine described to me the literary magazine he thought America really needed. It would feature the country's best fiction writers-specifically, its most refined stylists-and in this quarterly they would write only hard-core erotica. I don't think he ever came up with a name for the journal, and I don't remember the entire contributors' roster for the dream inaugural issue, but it included Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Harry Mathews, Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ben Marcus, and Nicholson Baker. Funding wasn't available, and soon my friend dropped out of the quality-lit game, started a family, and moved to the West Coast. The prestige-smut-lit-mag gap has yet to be filled.
