Believer Magazine

The Believer is a quarterly magazine that explores literature, arts, and culture, and has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award twelve times. Published by McSweeney’s, each edition features a mix of journalism, essays, personal interviews, a wide-ranging comics section, poetry, and occasionally, fun surprise extras. Established in 2003 by Heidi Julavits, Ed Park, and Vendela Vida, The Believer was originally titled The Optimist and seeks to support and uplift books and artists. Like many great publications, it has faced challenges and even ceased publication at times, but it continues to thrive thanks to its loyal and passionate readers.

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Articles

A Review of Immemorial

4 weeks ago | thebeliever.net | Rosa Boshier González |Rosa Gonzalez

Rosa Boshier González Flying over the snowy peaks of the Swiss Alps, Lauren Markham found herself searching for a word to describe the experience. The ice was melting, and the damage irreversible. “I wanted a space to remember and mourn the vanishing future,” she writes in Immemorial,her new book-length essay on the climate crisis, memorials, and language.
A Review of Barbara

4 weeks ago | thebeliever.net | Greta Rainbow

Greta Rainbow Before we consumed movies under duvet-cover mountains or on airplanes flying over oceans, people dressed up to watch them in theaters. Heavy red curtains peeled back to reveal the silver screen as if it were a stage.
The Making of the Buru Quartet

4 weeks ago | thebeliever.net | Joel Whitney

Joel Whitney 100 YEARS OF PRAMOEDYAOn October 6, 1973, Pramoedya Ananta Toer was ordered by prison guards to run double-time across Buru Island. The writer had been arrested eight years before, taken into custody in the middle of the night.
Character Studies: Cardinal Lawrence in Conclave

2 months ago | thebeliever.net | Isle McElroy

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that one of the most common problems a novelist faces when creating fictional characters is the problem every person must face: the struggle to know thyself. In a first-person novel, a narrator gifted with all-knowing personal insight isn’t just unrealistic, it’s also pretty annoying.
An Interview with Michael Smith

Dec 18, 2024 | thebeliever.net | Hayden Bennett

Hayden Bennett Over a year ago, a mutual friend let the artist Michael Smith know I was interested in doing an interview with him. The friend showed Smith the previous piece I’d published, an interview with someone also named Michael.
Finding Win Ng - Believer Magazine

Dec 18, 2024 | thebeliever.net | Nicole Lavelle

Nicole Lavelle Ten years ago in Nevada City, California, I encountered two coffee mugs in the front seat of an old Mercedes station wagon belonging to Joe Meade, an artist and collector. They immediately caught my eye: oversize and made of white porcelain, they were wrapped in charming illustrations, quirky line drawings depicting a mass of rabbits tumbling in playful, erotic entanglements.
Inside Out - Believer Magazine

Dec 18, 2024 | thebeliever.net | Pepper Stetler

Pepper Stetler On a Monday morning in early June, Nicole Storm arrived at the Creative Growth Art Center in downtown Oakland, California. Light poured in through broad windows that faced the street. Nicole put her jacket and lunch away in the closet and then selected a large piece of cardboard from a stack in a hallway.
An Interview with Martine Syms

Dec 18, 2024 | thebeliever.net | Claire Evans

Claire L. Evans I met Martine Syms at a microscopic art gallery in Los Angeles’s Chinatown in 2012.
The Reality of Our Seeing

Dec 18, 2024 | thebeliever.net | Hilton Als

Dearest friend of my youth, I ’ve wrestled with, and then worried about, the form this piece should take for some time now, for days and weeks, really, because on some level I wanted to write to you out of the same kind of immediacy, not to say intimacy, that Lynette’s images engender in me, and to get at that immediacy—the feeling of one voice addressing another—I finally settled on the epistolary form, just as Lynette’s paintings can be viewed as letters sent from that currently...
An Interview with Annie Leibovitz

Dec 18, 2024 | thebeliever.net | Carmen Winant

In many ways, I am an unlikely choice of interviewer for a subject like Annie Leibovitz. While I am trained as a photographer and still utilize photography across my work, for the most part I no longer author my own pictures. So I was skeptical when the call came: Were the editors of The Believer sure they wanted me for the job? Wouldn’t the magazine do better with someone more closely aligned with Leibovitz’s work—straddling the art, reportage, and editorial worlds as it does?