Welcome to Little Star and thank you for joining us! In Little Star’s journey to print of these last months, few have asked me the obvious question why, in an environment where the end of print is every day lamented, one would create a new print journal. That much seems self evident. The more frequent question seems to be how a journal today circumscribes its aesthetic turf—discover the young or celebrate the established? declare a school or cover the field? My answer to that would be exactly coterminous with the excellent works that appear in Little Star 1. But I might gloss this with a thought or two about our name and our epigraph. I lit on the little star as a motif because it seemed to me to embody the idea that literature inclines toward impulses that are enduring and expansive. While the literary business often gets caught up in the search for the new, writers, and readers, are working on a longer time horizon. I wanted to create a journal with that wider focus, a journal that would provide, in a hectic world, a refuge for more reflective forms of literary experience.
Another thought about that refuge: I’ve noticed in my years as an editor that people arrive in New York with the idea that they might find a “literary community,” only to realize, after a number of awkward parties and somewhat embarrassing encounters, that such a thing mostly exists on the page. It’s the editor’s dream to invite writers and readers into a room (albeit two-dimensional) where literature meets literature in a way that perpetuates this illusion. I hope Little Star will preside over many such encounters, with your help. Please order our inaugural issue and read the wonderful writers who have consented to join us, and please return to this page for a taste of their society.