Most artworks at some point die — they either disappear or are no longer relevant — and things made out of code can die especially fast. Something Mark Greif has argued that I find persuasive is that literary magazines should die. This is because literary magazines should be in conversation with their own times. Wag’s Revue has been, in however small and goofy a way, in conversation with its time. My biggest hope is that some of the people we’ve published will get famous because they do good work and someday some nerd will discover this website and get a nerd boner/diamond-hard nerd clit.

We’re going to try to make sure the site stays half-functional and the magazine’s bowels are preserved in their original form for however long that that’s feasible. Because the thing is: we’ve published so much great stuff in here over the years.

I hope that whether you’ve heard of us before or you haven’t, you wander through this archive like a kid in a video store. I intentionally use a metaphor for something that is, in a way, already dead.

If it’s helpful, here are my staff picks:

Will Guzzardi and Will Littons’ interview with Wells Tower; Rob Moor’s essay “On Douchebags”; stories by Brian Evenson; K. Silem Mohamad’s annagram poems made of Shakespearean sonnets; a Google screengrab poetry series “I Am Extremely Terrified of Chinese People” by Mathias Svalina; this one-page essay by Travis Smith; a fucked-up story called “The Recital” by Lauren Lovett; our interview with George Saunders; five Translations of Aurthur Rimbauld’s Voyelles; two “Stir Fry” Translations of Rogelio Saunders; Four Word™ Translations of Paul Verlaine; Louis Wittig’s short story “Linda Crum Wants to Talk”; our interview with David Rakoff; our interview with (arguably) the world’s greatest improvisers, TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi; Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas’ essay “After the Colonel”; Ben Rogers’ story about a thirsty bug, “Mayfly”;