This Sunday at 4:00 p.m. at the Twentynine Palms Community Center at Freedom Plaza, the last panel of the Twentynine Palms Book Fest will feature a special live issue of Beyond the Last Estate, the print-only literary magazine published and edited by author and Z107.7 reporter Gabriel Hart. He joined me to talk about how he fell into being a publisher of the magazine, which is now in its fifth issue.
Gabriel: “Beyond the Last Estate is the only print magazine I know that is doing specifically creative reporting on contemporary literature. I think you’re going to see some literature magazines that are going to play it very straight. Our writers kind of have a very creative approach to how they write about books, often injecting themselves into the narrative in a very personal way. It’s always very provocative, very irreverent, the kind of writing you might not see elsewhere right now.
“I was writing for a number of online literary sites like Lit Reactor, Los Angeles Review of Books, and then Lit Reactor folded, and then LA Review of Books kind of reorganized. I kind of saw a window that no one else was really taking advantage of. It occurred to me there was no print magazine for my kind of ecosystem, which is vaporous, but it’s specific. It’s sort of alternative literature, transgressive literature.
“It’s like kind of stuff outside of regular genres and I realized that there was no print magazine that was really documenting this scene. The book review section… it’s all these very short, hundred-word book reviews and it’s proven to be kind of a very potent format.
“What you’re starting to see is an author will get reviewed and then somewhere in a couple of pages, that author is reviewing a book. So it’s turned into this very kind of nice, like equalized kind of shared space. Like if you’re a new author, you might have a book review right next to someone you really admire.
Robert: “The event’s going to be part of the Twentynine Palms Book Festival in its third year. Do you want to talk a little bit about it? You say it’s a live issue of the magazine?”
Gabriel: “Yeah, I kind of wanted to frame it like that because I’m basically going to have like past and present contributors and subjects. So in a way, we’re capturing the magazine between issues four and five. So I’m calling this like the live 4.5 issue.”
Sunday’s hour-long panel starts at 4:00 p.m. and will be mediated by Gabriel Hart, featuring live conversations with past and present contributors and subjects of the irreverent publication, including:
- John Tottenham, author of the new novel Service (who will also be reading harsh “one-star” reviews of his otherwise critically acclaimed book).
- Mr. Omar King, author of An Odyssey of Dingbats
- Matthew Pegas, publisher at New Ritual Press.
- Jardine Libaire, author of You Are an Animal and publisher at P.O. Box Outer Space
- Michael Robert Liska, author of Alice, or the Wild Girl and host of What Ho… A Rat! Shakespear podcast
- Valerie Stivers (pronounced STY-vers), senior editor at UnHerd and author of The Writer’s Table: Famous Authors and Their Favorite Recipes, from which Gabriel Hart will attempt baking “Kafka Pretzels” and sharing with the audience.
