L’Esprit was founded in February 2022, the centenary month of the publication of Ulysses. The journal was thus born in celebration of the literary revolution of consciousness represented by High Modernism, and seeks to publish work in that spirit.
L’Esprit is a sister publication of Indirect Books. Follow our Substack for more.
We have grown considerably over the past few years and are fortunate enough to have published work by several outstanding new and established writers and critics, including Lucy Ives, Michael Nath, Diane Josefowicz, Christopher Linforth, Violeta Sotirova, Jaclyn Gilbert, H. S. Cross, Ella Baxter, Rebecca Fishow, Kat Meads, and, in translation, Hormoz Shahdadi and Paul Verlaine. We always prioritize emergent work from talented authors, and source the vast majority of each issue from unsolicited material via the slush pile.
We place an emphasis on promoting our authors’ work. This includes hosting Zoom launches for each issue; regularly holding in-person readings in New York and Chicago; having a table and off-site events at AWP; listing recent publications from other journals by past contributors in our Quarterly newsletters; and nominating for major literary awards. We aim to build a community around our mission to champion fearless writing, and as such are honored to support our contributors as they develop their careers.
L’Esprit searches for fearless, audacious, innovative writing that takes risks at the sentence level and immerses itself in the slippery, wondrous underworld of the mind. Interior-focused, character-driven, language-first work is core to our aesthetic principles, writing that eschews convention and experiments at both the technical and formal levels. From Editor Jessica Denzer’s conversation regarding her essay but all is to be dared: “But I think all those writers, even though they’re doing different things, have perfected something that I’m always trying to do: they work from the flow of the sentence, the poetry of it. Even in the most gut wrenching of moments, it’s their language that roots it onto the page and so into the reader’s mind. It’s the language that comes first to reveal the idea, the experience, and the feeling.”
The rendering of consciousness via advanced literary techniques allows fiction to portray the human experience across disparate cultures and societies, and discuss important realities of the modern world by shedding light on the universal nature of diverse lives. Think Virginia Woolf—both Mrs. Dalloway and “Modern Fiction”—think James Joyce—both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake—and think Rachel Cusk, Lucy Corin, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Anne Carson, Renata Adler, Annie Ernaux. Think Margaret Anderson’s Little Review and T. S. Eliot’s Criterion. Rich prose and vividly rendered scenes, peopled by psychologically complex characters engaged in authentic, verisimilar stories, constitute the L’Esprit raison d’être.
The L’Esprit logo is an original interpretation of Auguste Rodin’s Le Penseur, designed by Jessica Denzer. Below are the L’Esprit house portraits, of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, drawn for us by Issue One contributor Jennifer Ostopovich, in celebration of our most direct literary ancestors.
L’Esprit, a collectanea of consciousness-forward fiction and thought in the revolutionary spirit of High Modernism, publishes two full issues per year, in April and October, released as print, digital, and online versions, along with four online quarterlies. Purchase back issues and other merchandise at lespritliteraryreview.org/le-magasin. L’Esprit is entirely non-profit. All proceeds go towards paying our contributors and meeting various costs. The journal is a labor of literary expression, with a goal of championing the most fearless, unconventional, risk-adept writing we can find.
The L’Esprit motto, in mediam mentem, is borrowed with great admiration from Dorrit Cohn’s seminal study of rendering consciousness in fiction, Transparent Minds.
L'Esprit Literary Review 