Little Star Journal

Little Star Journal is an annual print literary magazine founded in 2009 by Ann Kjellberg, founder of the book-reviewing newsletter Book Post, long-time editor at The New York Review of Books, and the literary executor of the poet Joseph Brodsky. ^[1] Little Star appeared in seven print issues between 2007 and 2017.

Little Star featured the work of Derek Walcott, Wisława Szymborska, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, Ann Beattie, Sigrid Nunez, Charles Simic, Gary Snyder, Marilyn Hacker, Tomasz Różycki, Alice Fulton, Jean Valentine, James Kelman, Padgett Powell, Paul Muldoon, Jamaica Kincaid, Adam Zagajewski, Eliot Weinberger, C. K. Williams, Mark Strand, Caleb Crain, Lydia Davis, Carl Phillips, Joy Williams, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, W. G. Sebald, Durs Grünbein, and Tim Parks, among others. John Banville called it, “A very fine venture indeed, everything such a magazine should be.” ^[2]

From 2013 to 2015, Little Star published a weekly app version, Little Star Weekly, with the app platform 29th Street Publishing. Little Star Weekly also featured music and art edited by Alex Ross, Mary Weatherford, and John Zinsser, among others.

The magazine is rooted in book culture and the reflective traditions of a number of well-remembered hand-held journals of the past, such as The Criterion, The Partisan Review, Antaeus. It was the agility of digital reproduction and the reach of literary blogging and social networking that prompted editors to frame a print tradition with mixed-media.^[3]

The magazine takes its name from a line from Joseph Brodsky: "But soon, I’m told, I’ll lose my epaulets altogether / and dwindle into a little star."^[4]