It’s a tough time for Canadian magazines, so “the fact that the Vancouver Review is going to be five years old at the end of the year is an accomplishment,” writes Timothy Taylor in The Globe and Mail.
The Review, an eclectic arts and letters offering in wide format on
glossy paper, is published by Gudrun Will and Mark Mushet. Its mix of
non-fiction and fiction is not so much journalism as part of that odd
genre imperfectly called “creative writing.” The latest issue has a
personal essay on the intrusiveness of Facebook, an attempt at
profiling a Vancouver neighbourhood, a ride-along with a private
detective, some quirky stories and a quite strange artist’s version of
west coast cartography called “Brutish Colonia” and … well, look up the contents for yourself.

It ain’t the New Yorker — but it is one of ours, and so earlier this year I decided to direct my own few dollars away from renewing my New Yorker subscription (which is mostly online anyway) and into subscriptions to the Vancouver Review, Geist and Border Crossings, along with some other regulars.

Now,
if only dead tree news vendors would stop hiding Canadian publications
at the back of their racks behind the print versions of Hollywood …
but that’s another issue.