Chekhov’s Mistess

How Many Reasons Do You Need to Love Rain Taxi?

Rain Taxi is a quarterly journal based in Minneapolis that “publishes reviews of literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction with an emphasis on works that push the boundaries of language, narrative, and genre.” You can get the journal free in bookstores around the country or you can subscribe for only $12 in the U.S.

I am not a long-time reader of Rain Taxi although I probably passed by copies of it in the bookstores that I haunt hundreds of times. But, like litblogs, Rain Taxi is valuable for finding new things to read. I’ve enjoyed it enough that I thought I would talk about it here. So if you don’t know this journal, here are a few good reasons to check it out:

1) Open your copy to the contents page. Two-thirds of the books reviewed you’ve never heard of or only vaguely heard of. Flip through and you’re bound to find something you like. The latest issue has 54 reviews, three interviews and four feature articles – that’s nearly 250 pieces a year on things you’re not going to get exposure to in a lot of places (if anywhere, it will be the land of the litblog, but this is structured and in print).

2) Scott Esposito is a contributor. We know he’s good.

3) So is Matthew Cheney.

3) Interviews with people like William T. Vollman, who does not do a lot of interviews.

But I ask you Vollmanites, is he serious about the FBI?

4) The reviews are of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, drama and graphic novels. Something for everyone, and if you’re like me, browsing through you might just stumble upon something outside of your normal reading habits.

5) The poet and blogger Ron Silliman says of Rain Taxi: “It’s such a rich, well-considered gathering that Rain Taxi just stuns you when you first see a copy. This is what a book review really could be like if only editors dared to be great. If only!”

Okay, that’s enough, but you get the idea. The latest issue put me over the edge on Rabassa’s If This Be Treason, which I will soon be adding to my woefully overgrown TBR pile and I think enough of the reviewers here that I’m skipping over the review of Harry Mathews’ My Life in the CIA because it’s on deck and I don’t want to cloud my opinion of it beforehand.

I read the NY Times Book Review for amusement to see what people might be talking about at cocktail parties, I read the New York Review of Books so I don’t have to actually read the books they write about, but I read Rain Taxi because I know that it will influence what I do read.

comments

The name alone is enough to make me love Rain Taxi. Very evocative.

    – Patry (07/07  at  12:11 AM)

That’s funny, but I never even gave the name much thought, but you’re right.

    – Bud Parr (07/07  at  10:59 AM)

Let’s hear it for Rain Taxi! I think I first encountered it while hunting on the internet, became a subscriber (alas no free copies in Toronto bookstores) and now consider it indispensable as an intelligent guide to the vast world of excellent small press literature, books that I wouldn’t know about from any of the heavy-duty print lit journals (NYRB, LRB, etc.)

Reason no. 6 for loving Rain Taxi: its excellent complementary on-line version with yet more worth reading that is not in the print version.

Reason no. 7 for loving RT: its own publications of (mostly) poetry.

    – Norma (07/13  at  10:50 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: July 06, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Literary Journals

• Comments:3
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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