ABOUT

A not-so-well-kept secret: Most literary magazines are boring.

Above all else, La Petite Zine seeks to be un-boring, to at once challenge what a literary magazine is meant to be and do, and also to go toe-to-toe with the desiccated tradition of literary magazine.

La Petite Zine started, from its first issue, as a kind of community. Drawing from a new tradition of poetry bulletin boards and local readings, LPZ contained the multitude a reader would see in those Web days of yore -- the writer that, in a sense, homesteaded the URLs. That was fine and dandy.

Then, starting with Issue 4, La Petite Zine adopted another community, or coterie, and has never looked back. In the tradition of Alfred Leslie's The Hasty Papers, a 1960 one-off that both depended on friends and correspondents (from Sartre to Castro), La Petite Zine depends on the goodwill of e-mail and conversation to generate its issues.

Like Frank O'Hara's idea of poetry's intimate phone call, e-mail has been the way we publish writers and, heckle the cosmos with them. Heckle heckle heckle. From Bob Holman to Ethan Paquin, from Mojo Nixon to Wang Ping, from Rick Rockwell to Joe Wenderoth, La Petite Zine is nothing more and nothing less than the most diverse and far-reaching best Web mimeo out there.

It's only literary magazine you can play air guitar to. And that's not boring.