In 1997, Francis Ford Coppola did what only a five-time Oscar winner with a restless curiosity could get away with: he started a literary magazine. Zoetrope: All-Story, co-founded with editor Adrienne Brodeur and based in San Francisco, was born from Coppola's conviction that short fiction is the narrative art form most akin to film — and that great stories, given the right platform, might eventually become great movies. The first issues published interviews and fiction by the likes of Salman Rushdie, David Mamet, and Don DeLillo. Within a few years, the magazine had one of the highest circulations of any literary journal in America.
What makes Zoetrope distinctive is not just the caliber of its contributors — though the roster reads like a shortlist for every major literary prize: Gabriel García Márquez, Cynthia Ozick, Joyce Carol Oates, Karen Russell, Miranda July — but the way the magazine treats the relationship between text and image. Each quarterly issue features a rotating guest designer given full creative freedom over the visual identity. Past designers have included David Bowie, David Lynch, Guillermo del Toro, and Florence Shaw of the post-punk band Dry Cleaning. Every issue also includes a Classic Reprint: a piece of short fiction or drama that has been adapted into film, from Steven Millhauser's story that inspired The Illusionist to Alice Munro's tale behind Away from Her.
Under longtime editor Michael Ray, Zoetrope has won four National Magazine Awards for Fiction and published first-time work by David Benioff, Adam Haslett, and others who went on to major careers. The annual Short Fiction Competition, judged by writers like Colum McCann and Tommy Orange, forwards winning stories to leading literary agencies. And for a select group of writers, there is the annual workshop at Coppola's Blancaneaux Lodge in Belize — a week of writing and study in the jungle, which is about as far from a fluorescent-lit MFA seminar as you can get.
Printed quarterly in California, available only in print, and stubbornly dedicated to the short story at a time when the novel dominates the literary conversation, Zoetrope: All-Story remains one of the most celebrated literary periodicals in the world. It wears its famous founder lightly and its editorial standards heavily — exactly the way it should be.
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