First Publications
Introduction by Askold Melnyczuk
When Valerie Duff, our managing editor, was one year old, AGNI had just reincarnated as a literary magazine: twenty-five years later, the vectors converged. In that quarter of a century, several waves of writers have broken into print through AGNI’s pages, among them some who are widely acknowledged as the best of their generation (you know who you are). We make too much of numbers and age, but there are milestones worth recognizing and the twenty-five-year mark seems by consensus one of them. We celebrate it with this special issue, for which older writers, friends of the magazine from various stages in its history, chose work by new writers who’d never appeared in a national publication. This is how the editorial chain of being at its best has always worked—as J. Laughlin, dean of American editors, will certainly testify. But the exchange of energies and intelligence needs to be reciprocal. Young writers who fail to discover their literary ancestry are not likely to develop past the first spurt. What an artist desires, as Derek Walcott puts it, is continuance; and the exchange must move in both directions at once.