The Believer sounds like the name of a religious magazine but it isn't. The Believer is a literary magazine. Or maybe not. Can you be a literary magazine if you run an article about a convention of people who collect '70s-era Mego action figure dolls and you tout the story with the cover line "Adorable Flaws, Goofy Charm, and Soft, Rubbery Heads"?
The Believer reviews books, which is certainly literary, but it also reviews motels and animals and hand tools, such as the Ace Heavy-Duty Glue Gun, which doesn't sound very literary at all.
The magazine is published 10 times a year in San Francisco by a gaggle of young editors who explain their brainchild in a cryptic statement on their Web site: "We will focus on writers and books we like. We will give people and books the benefit of the doubt. The working title of this magazine was The Optimist."
So far, the Believer has survived for two years despite the fact that it contains no ads and costs $8 a copy and is impossible to pigeonhole.
Or maybe it has survived because it's impossible to pigeonhole. Although the covers of the Believer all look nearly identical, you never know what you'll find inside, which is the best thing about the mag.
It was last November's issue that made me a Believer fan. It contained interesting Q&A interviews with playwright August Wilson and filmmaker David O. Russell, plus an article by historian Luc Sante that traced the origins of the word "funky" back to jazz legend Buddy Bolden, and a piece on what it's like to work as a roller-coaster reviewer for Fun World, a trade mag for the amusement park industry.
Best of all was a long, strange story on a subject I never thought I'd care about -- an unknown avant-garde novel, "The Story of Don Miff," written in 1886 by Virginius Dabney, a former Confederate soldier, whose playful postmodern novel makes him seem, wrote Paul Collins, "like a colleague of Vonnegut and Barth, and not some bearded and top-hatted fogy from the era of Horatio Alger and Louisa May Alcott."
Scattered throughout the issue, for no apparent reason, were little line drawings of cops and crooks observed in the superior court of Salem, Mass.
Is that eclectic and eccentric enough for you?
The March issue can't quite match November for sheer what'll they think of next-ness, but it has its moments. There's a Q&A interview with filmmaker Alexander Payne, director of "About Schmidt" and "Sideways." Asked if he'll ever run for office, Payne came out with an answer that shows he'd fit right in here in Washington:
"Well, even though I can neither confirm nor deny that I do or do not intend to run for office one day, I may or may not have a plan for that which I'm not prepared to discuss."
There's also an interview with Marjorie Grene, a 94-year-old philosopher at Virginia Tech. I'd never heard of Grene and I know zip about philosophy so I was baffled by most of the interview, but this exchange perked me up:
Q: I forgot to ask about philosopher of science Imre Lakatos --
A: I didn't kill him!
