I don’t pay much attention to Twitter notifications of new followers. Most of them, I suspect, will vanish in a day or two because they are spam accounts, or they’ll stop following me because I didn’t immediately follow back. But I do glance at the names just in case, and today a follow came in from an account called @LAReviewofBooks.

What? They cannot be serious, surely? A literary review magazine, following me? Then I looked up their website. This is apparently a very new venture, with the site in a temporary blog on tumblr until their IT guys can finish coding the back end. It is, however, the place where I read this Roger Luckhurst review of Gary Wolfe’s Evaporating Genres yesterday. Scrolling down I found a wonderful review of William Gibson’s Zero History by another academic friend, Sherryl Vint. Now I was intrigued.

Checking the About page I discover that the magazine has a large staff, including eight section heads. One of them is Rob Latham, who is one of my fellow directors at the Translation Awards. He’s doing Speculative Literature. There’s also a section head for Comics. Obviously there are other areas too, but hey, 25% good stuff already, and the YA/Kids section will probably be of interest too. Further investigation of the list of Contributing Editors turned up Nicola Griffith, Jonathan Lethem and Kim Stanley Robinson.

This isn’t quite the same thing as Salon Futura. There doesn’t appear to be any deliberate attempt to cross-fertilize specfic and mainstream literature. But it is a very high profile literary review magazine that looks like it will treat all forms of literature equally, which I most definitely approve of. I’m also pleased to see that it intends to look far beyond the USA, and hopefully beyond the English language.

Needless to say, the site’s feed has gone straight into Google Reader.