Volume 47, Issue 4

IN A LITTLE OVER two years, this quarterly will have a miraculous birthday: its fiftieth. It is tempting to use the antici pation of this event as an excuse for a vapid gloat, noting that literary magazines are like mayflies, ephemera, creatures of a day. MR, while not a Galapagos tortoise just yet, is no mayfly either.

All truisms contain a particle of truth. One says: longevity is of less importance than quality of Ufe. A magazine's history should inform the current table of contents, but never determine it. For this reason we are imagining our birthday celebration as something other than retrospective. The 2009 half-century issue will be all new, rather than a compilation of reprints. We will turn to past contributors, but to new voices as well. Between now and then, we'll extend our traditional commitment to civil rights with a special queer studies issue.

All this takes money. We are excited to announce that MR is one of only two literary organizations in Massachusetts to be selected for the 2006 Catalogue for Philanthropy, the most authoritative arbiter of charitable and cultural organizations in the state. Their editors wrote, "MR is one of the nation's leading literary magazines, and further distinctive in joining highest level artistic concerns with pressing public issues." Visit their website (http://wwrw.catalogueforphilanthropy.org/) to see our page, and consider making a donation yourself, no matter whether you're a philanthropist, philateUst, philanderer, or Philadelphian. We've got another half century to pay for.

David Lenson
for the editors

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