Defeating the Literary Industrial Complex

In the 1980s, young writers were often advised to submit their work to literary journals and small magazines.

This was the era of Ray Carver, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, and the Barthelme brothers. The “little magazines”, as they were called, were how those guys found each other, and got their early stories published in the 1970s. The literary journal route was the way undiscovered writers could be discovered.