LEAN magazine

don't you want to "burn this place down" lol - but in all seriousness the important thing is the viability of creativity and its independence from the creative industries

Home | LEAN magazine LEAN magazine is devoted to non-protagonist-centered fiction, an approach to literature that formally deemphasizes the protagonist.

LEAN magazine is here for the holidays with Issue #10

Sophie Drukman-Feldstein's "Economy of Language" depicts a world of exhaustible speech - you better watch what you say

Meanwhile Owen Yingling's "Mene Mene" is a story of uncertain resurrection

www.lean-mag.com

LEAN Magazine is open for business! Please send along your work.

LEAN has mostly focused on fiction but we're very interested in memoir, especially the kind that evokes the contexts and conditions of life, sidelining the individual for the sake of conveying useful information

Diego Lama The Silent City

Another translation published! Check out my translation of Diego Lama’s story “The Silent City” in LEAN.

A big thanks to Semyon Khokhlov for featuring us!

I wonder how you can tell they didn't want to engage...because the exchange is awkward? I've lived in the Midwest, too, and you can talk to people, and sure there can be some awkwardness in any convo with a stranger but that's par for the course and often clears quickly

but isn't that a reason for talking to people and explaining? this is just a way of keeping walls up

Home | LEAN magazine LEAN magazine is devoted to non-protagonist-centered fiction, an approach to literature that formally deemphasizes the protagonist.

LEAN magazine is back at it with issue #9!

Diego Lama's "The Silent City," translated by Rose Facchini, portrays a besieged city expanding toward the infinite.

Stephen Mortland's amazing story "Three Sofias" is all about promiscuous acts of attention.

www.lean-mag.com

Home | LEAN magazine LEAN magazine is devoted to non-protagonist-centered fiction, an approach to literature that formally deemphasizes the protagonist.

LEAN magazine is back at it with issue #9!

Diego Lama's "The Silent City," translated by Rose Facchini, portrays a besieged city expanding toward the infinite.

Stephen Mortland's amazing story "Three Sofias" is all about promiscuous acts of attention.

www.lean-mag.com

thanks for the interest but I'm out of those copies...I'm planning on doing another print run sometime in the next month or so

The new LEAN Magazine - Issue 8 - is here!

Featuring Jon Conley's story of a hot day at the beach where the people aren't quite right.

And a story by Jon Doughboy that stirs up a heteroglossic stew on a very clear night in Idaho.

www.lean-mag.com

The new LEAN Magazine - Issue 8 - is here!

Featuring Jon Conley's story of a hot day at the beach where the people aren't quite right.

And a story by Jon Doughboy that stirs up a heteroglossic stew on a very clear night in Idaho.

www.lean-mag.com

The Human Situation in the Work of Alexander Kluge All of Kluge’s books contribute to one large, ongoing project to build up a toolkit of resistant feelings that readers can use to plot their own ways out.

Very excited to share this essay about the great German author Alexander Kluge whose unusual work is all about common human feelings and "happy endings that don't lie."

www.full-stop.net/2025/03/06/f...

Thanks so much to @fullstopmag.bsky.social and @kailanthropy.bsky.social for editing!

The Human Situation in the Work of Alexander Kluge All of Kluge’s books contribute to one large, ongoing project to build up a toolkit of resistant feelings that readers can use to plot their own ways out.

Very excited to share this essay about the great German author Alexander Kluge whose unusual work is all about common human feelings and "happy endings that don't lie."

www.full-stop.net/2025/03/06/f...

"It's really not so easy to find sentences that explain who you are. But maybe it's not so important, either."

---Jenny Erpenbeck

There's nothing essential about narrative modes and that's especially true when it comes to their relation to protagonism.

3rd person can be used to center an individual just as 1st person can be used to sideline them.

The deciding factor is often how much narrative attention a character receives, how present they are in the text, how much space they literally take up.

There's nothing essential about narrative modes and that's especially true when it comes to their relation to protagonism.

3rd person can be used to center an individual just as 1st person can be used to sideline them.

Self-centered protagonism is a problem that demands formal solutions.

It's not enough for a character to be "self-aware" or even to look out beyond themselves because such looking can easily turn into self-affirmation.

Anyway, it's a really great work out recently from
@spurleditions.bsky.social in a new translation by Dana Lupo

The narrative does not present this primarily as a problem for the hero but rather as a problem for other people, and that's precisely because this novel does not subscribe to the modern dogma of protagonist supremacy

The utopian novel The Known Southern Land (1676) is the kind of early work that can help us understand the blind spots of the modern novel's insistence on the supremacy of the protagonist...

Anyway, it's a really great work out recently from
@spurleditions.bsky.social in a new translation by Dana Lupo

The narrative does not present this primarily as a problem for the hero but rather as a problem for other people, and that's precisely because this novel does not subscribe to the modern dogma of protagonist supremacy

rather it results in a natural concern for the welfare of the people that come into the hero's life: "for it seems that I lived only by causing the death of those who were trying their hardest to save my life."

The early life of the hero of this novel is marked by the loss of his parents and several other people attempting to take care of him. But this does not, as it would in the modern novel, lead to self-centered reflexivity (I'm cursed, I'm a problem, etc.)...

The utopian novel The Known Southern Land (1676) is the kind of early work that can help us understand the blind spots of the modern novel's insistence on the supremacy of the protagonist...

LEAN magazine is open for non-protagonist-centered business.

Are you tired of lit that doggedly tracks the private concerns of an individual?

Do you think the individual story is always just one element in a larger human situation?

If you do, send your stuff to LEAN!

The 1st issue of LEAN - with work by Caren Beilin and Tom Comitta - is now in print! It'll soon be available for free in Philly bookstores and cafes but I'm also giving 10 away to anyone outside the city. Just DM me if you'd like one!