Writerly power-couple Tom Jenks (former fiction editor at Esquire, GQ and Scribner's), and novelist Carol Edgarian (Rise of the Euphrates), are profiled by the SF Chronicle about their literary-online magazine, Narrative. It has "selections from writer friends such as Jane Smiley, Tobias Wolff and Joyce Carol Oates;" its goal is "to connect more readers to more literary writers." It is literally subtitled "The Future of Reading." (The future of reading still involves Joyce Carol Oates and the Internet?) Sixty-five people volunteer for Narrative without pay, including big shots like Michael Wiegers of Copper Canyon press, a poetry publisher. So why exactly is the future of literary writing online?

According to Narrative contributer and writer Rick Bass:

"The old ways, though well-intentioned, just aren't working anymore and haven't been working for about 20 years," says Bass. "It's just that books are on their own more than ever, these days. And that's fine, if one prefers to run into a headwind. But sometimes literary works benefit from any slight gust of tailwind, and when you believe in the American literary tradition as deeply as Tom and Carol do, you want to explore ways of empowering and carrying that tradition forward."

2 editors' online journal gives new life to literature [SF Chronicle]