Welcome to The Threepenny Review’s website! I hope you’ll take this opportunity to sample the writing in our Reading Room, so you have some idea of what we do.

And that’s just an appetizer, since we put only a small portion of each issue on the web site. If you want to get the full flavor of our quarterly magazine, you’ll need to leaf through the actual, printed pages—which you can do by ordering either the current issue or a past issue through this site.

I’d like to give you a little preview of what to expect in the months to come, if you decide to join us as a subscriber. Perhaps you noticed the names Wendell Berry, T. J. Clark, Sarah Deming, Geoff Dyer, Deborah Eisenberg, Richard Ford, Ibe Liebenberg, Toni Martin, Jill McDonough, Sharon Olds, Michael Ondaatje, Robert Pinsky, Elizabeth Tallent, and Clifford Thompson in recent issues. You will see these names repeatedly in our pages, attached to wonderful essays, marvelous poems, and exciting new fiction.

If you wish to purchase older issues, you can find listings of all the past work we’ve ever published by these writers and many more. Just go to our Threepenny Search Form and type the name of your favorite writer into the Author slot: the full list will come up, allowing you to choose what you want. All of our back issues are still available for sale, often at very reasonable prices.

But Threepenny is more than just the individual items it publishes; its effect is cumulative. I’m hoping you’ll find this out firsthand, by choosing to subscribe for a mere $25 a year. As you’ll see in the course of your subscription year, the appeal of the magazine lies partly in its offbeat combinations of the tried-and-true with the deeply unexpected. I hope you’ll be pleased with that mixture. And I also hope that, if you see anything you want to comment on, you’ll feel free to write to me about it, either through the post or via email.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, we always welcome donations from our readers and subscribers; we even offer a secure online method for you to make tax-deductible donations. And if you are a subscriber, you can also email any change of address to me, if you like—just be sure to include your full name and old address as well as the complete new address in the email message.

Welcome, also, to our online-only feature, The Lesser Blog!

All best,
Wendy Lesser, Editor

P.S.  A few words of praise for the magazine from some of our long-time readers and writers:

“After your newspaper has brought you down, open The Threepenny Review. Its contents will remind you why you care about the world and its peoples. The voices to be found in it are real, the essays, the poetry—poems are not just filler in The Threepenny Review—the memoirs, the photographs, the reviews of literature, music, and art. To read this journal is restorative; it brings a sense of solidarity and kinship in its respect for the past and hope for the future. Wendy Lesser’s dedication and struggle are honored on every page. Print culture lives.”
—Darryl Pinckney

“An ideal party on pages, always surprising, always enlivening, sometimes disturbing, often consoling, peculiar, contemplative, sparkly, moody, compelling. Long-time companions and new ones, unexpectedly intimate encounters—the pieces are just the length you’d like them to be and remarkably substantial. And the photographs are absolutely astonishing!”—Deborah Eisenberg

“Everybody should rush right out and subscribe to The Threepenny Review.”—Tony Kushner

“There are vanishingly few magazines left in this country which seem pitched at the general literary reader and which consistently publish such interesting, high-quality criticism, reflection, argument, fiction and poetry… Threepenny is thankfully still out there.”—Jonathan Franzen

“Always fresh, always lively.”—J. M. Coetzee

“Discriminating, exuberant, and capacious.”—Stephen Greenblatt