Full Stop nurtures contemporary independent literary culture and the aesthetically, linguistically, and socially marginalized communities of writers and critics of which it is composed. Believing that a book’s significance can be elevated by high-energy interchange between writers and readers, Full Stop publishes online essays, interviews, and multi-genre critical inquiries that nourish the life of a work after publication. Founded in 2011, Full Stop has become an important resource for readers and writers, often providing the only in-depth critical engagement small-press publications receive. Full Stop also publishes innovative cultural criticism in a newsletter, monthly podcast, and quarterly magazine, and sponsors an Editorial Fellows program.
A dynamic and richly eclectic platform for criticism, Full Stop has the intellectual independence to remain untethered to the zeitgeist while striving to be fearlessly contemporary in its curiosity and range of topics. For the past ten years, this digital magazine has been devoted to fighting the decline of criticism, supporting small presses through its impressive reviews supplement that brings hundreds of books that might otherwise go unnoticed into larger literary conversations. Here are reviews of books that may not be brand new, but which Full Stop’s editors have recognized as neglected or underappreciated, or both. Here, too, are essays that are personal, political, literary, and always exhilaratingly askew. In an era of digital sameness, this approach has never seemed more vital.