The Threepenny Review

The Threepenny Review is a wonderful quarterly publication on literature and the arts that is edited and published by Wendy Lesser in Berkeley. Besides insightful book reviews, it publishes essays on music, art, architecture, and all the arts; it also includes poetry, fiction, memoirs, and photographs. Two characteristics of the Threepenny Review always strike me, every single issue. First, there is a sense of abundance and generosity. Whole pages are devoted to poetry; photographs are plentiful and large, with enough space around them to allow us to truly appreciate them. Second, most of the writing has the piquancy of originality, sometimes quirkiness, often surprise. For example, the Fall 2009 issue includes "A Symposium on the Piano," in which various writers comment on the topic from various angles (the piano as furniture, the piano as art, the piano as it influenced Kandinsky and other artists, the question of how pianos should reproduce Baroque music, and a riff on various types of pianos by the jazz pianist Ethan Iverson). The same issue includes multiple photographs by Ben Shahn throughout its pages; as the photography note points out, Shahn - the painter, muralist, and printmaker - "is probably least known for his photographs" (p. 7), so this issue gives us a different view of an artist we have known in a different way. The Threepenny Review is informative, enjoyable, and even exciting to read; I feel a sense of discovery when I read each new issue. As a bonus, subscriptions are inexpensive.