The New York Review of Magazines

The Believer

By Kristen Bellstrom

WHAT’S that?” asked my roommate. I was crouched over the table, holding The Believer sideways as I squinted at an acronym-filled flow chart marking the center of the magazine. It’s a new literary magazine, I explained eagerly, and it has a chart mapping the history of “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels. She cocked an eyebrow. “That’s a weird magazine,” she said, no doubt thinking The Believer and I are a perfect match. She has a point; the magazine can be weird. The September issue included the transcript of an interview where the reporter’s tape recorder failed (all that remains is a list of questions interspersed with blank space); a Q&A with comic Andy Richter annotated with Richter’s pseudooutraged, post-interview commentary; and articles about unicorns, a Michigan motel and antler chandeliers.

But beneath the quirkiness—call it originality if you like it, pretension if you don’t— beats the heart of an ambitious literary magazine. Since its launch in March 2003, The Believer has included interviews with David Foster Wallace, Jim Crace and Jamaica Kincaid, as well as articles by Jonathan Lethem and Rick Moody. And the magazine does not focus exclusively on writers. Each month it includes an interview with a philosopher, and it regularly features artists, actors, musicians and anyone else its editors believe has something important to say about literature and culture.

The Believer is the brainchild of novelists Heidi Julavits and Vendela Vida, and Village Voice senior editor Ed Park, who together birthed the concept for the magazine when they were graduate students. Julavits and Park are now The Believer’s articles editors, with Vida serving as interviews editor (the magazine has no editor in chief). The first issue created a hubbub within the literary community, thanks to Julavits’ lead article, “Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!” The piece condemned the rise of “snark” in book reviewing, a term Julavits characterized as “hostility for hostility’s sake,” and identified James Wood, Dale Peck and other critics as purveyors of particularly mean-spirited abuse. With its call for a more open-minded, accepting treatment of books and authors, the article established the editorial tone of The Believer.

Julavits also declared that the magazine’s features would run at least 4,000 words. In fact, The Believer’s Web site describes the publication as “a monthly magazine where length is no object.” So far, the magazine has been true to its word, although it also contains short sections like “Underway,” where various writers describe their current projects, and single-page profiles of such oddball subjects as tools, motels and mammals. Not only are the articles long (one on books about writing in the December 2003/January 2004 issue spans thirteen full pages), but they are printed in a single unbroken section, not lopped off after a couple of pages with their conclusions banished to the rear of the publication. As a result, readers can focus on each article as they would a book. Having the reader’s undivided attention gives the writers plenty of breathing room to establish the complexity required for such long-form pieces.

Of course, not every idea deserves quite so much attention. This is especially true of the interviews, which are presented in Q&A format. In an article she wrote for the online magazine Slate, Vida describes her editing technique to an intern. “When you get bored, you cut,” she said. Vida does not bore easily. I must confess that I did not always make it through the interviews; my attention span expired halfway through the ten pages devoted to artist Aleksanda Mir, and I nearly lost consciousness when Usama Fayyad, “one of the world’s foremost experts on data mining,” began describing the complexity of the algorithm he wrote to look for volcanoes on Venus. The extended format can flatten engaging subjects–I skimmed a bland November interview with Tina Fey of “SNL.”

The magazine fares better when it abandons the structure of the Q&A and turns its contributors loose. With each new issue, I go straight to novelist Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” a sort of free-form diary in which the author rambles entertainingly— and sometimes profoundly—about reading, books and daily life. Jim Shepard, who regularly contributes essays about film, is another favorite.

There is no way I can make it through a review of The Believer without mentioning that the magazine is distributed by McSweeney’s Publishing, the independent press founded by writer Dave Eggers. Eggers, who also happens to be Vida’s husband, became both the idol and the whipping boy of the young literati when his fictionalized memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” became a best-seller in 2000. Although Eggers downplays his involvement with The Believer, he concedes that he advised the magazine’s editors on design. And readers of such publications as Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern will immediately note the family resemblance.

The Believer is nearly square in shape, without a hint of gloss. The cover is adorned with illustrated portraits of interviewees, interspersed with witty, parentheses-laced cover lines—“Bored in a Toga: How drunken, bloated, self-indulgent literary readings contributed to the decline and fall of the Roman empire (and why an old man feigned death to get to the loo)”—and a list of this month’s “supra-long” interviews. The magazine’s title sits atop this flurry of activity, proclaiming itself in bold block letters. The net effect is reminiscent of a comic book or graphic novel.

The Believer is printed on heavy, cream-colored paper. Each page has a thick, colored border like an expensive sheet of stationery. Photographs, which do not reproduce well on the matte paper, are used sparingly. Instead, the pages are decorated with small illustrations, or the elegant columns of type are left to stand unadorned. The quality of The Believer’s production is closer to that of a paperback book than a typical glossy magazine. In fact, I felt guilty writing in its margins and wouldn’t dream of throwing an issue away. Of course, my reluctance to consign it to the recycling bin may also be related to its $8 price tag.

The Believer doesn’t carry any advertising. Eggers explained the philosophy behind the lack of ads in an email interview with The San Francisco Chronicle, saying that magazines with fewer than 100,000 subscribers are unlikely to get significant ad revenue. “It’s better to skip the ads,” he wrote, “charge a little bit more for each copy, and hope the readers understand the decision.”

I think there is a place for The Believer in the family of literary magazines. If The New York Review of Books is the clan’s intellectual patriarch and The New Yorker the urbane uncle mixing Manhattans at cocktail hour, The Believer is the young cousin, fresh out of school and still willing to experiment and take risks. Like the younger generation of readers it appeals to, the magazine is still figuring out what it wants to be when it grows up.