In Print
volume 11 | 2024
Eleven years old and entering our middle school days, we feel ourselves leaning into the thrill of change. Things are somehow even weirder and more whimsical than usual as we move classrooms, grow new inches, and discover unlikely friends.
AWARD JUDGES: Kaveh Akbar and Evie Shockley
Past Volumes
Turning ten feels like a big deal. In some ways, we’ve refused to grow up. We’ve still got our small and scrappy spirit, perhaps this year even more than usual. In other ways, however, we own up to our maturity. We’re more sure of ourselves, and we know what we like.
AWARD JUDGES: Ariana Reines and Yiyun Li
We are a square number and a square issue, but we resist becoming old fashioned, or dull. Instead, we traffic in delight and surprise, in risk and reward, in writing that leaves a mark.
AWARD JUDGES: Elif Batuman and Chen Chen
Now at the end of year 8 (or, perhaps, year 4+4), 4x4 enters its third generation. There is an irony to thinking through the future of this creative endeavor at the end of a period of such great uncertainty over the future, a paradox which we see reflected in this year’s pieces.
AWARD JUDGES: Ottessa Moshfegh and Claudia Rankine
For us, enthusiasm is paired with risk. There is a lot of pleasure in reading a piece that doesn’t quite meet us in our expectations of what it was supposed to be, as if it comes out of the corner to scold us, reprimanding us for our desire to fit it into a particular shape.
AWARD JUDGE: Jhumpa Lahiri
The magazine has now arrived at the tender age of six. In dog-years, we would be middle-aged, past our youth, well into our forties. But as the work gathered in this volume attests, 4x4 has not staled.
AWARD JUDGES: Emma Cline and Dorothea Lasky
Things are different, things are the same. The work, though, is still excellent. Good writing should feel good, should be a pleasure even if, at times, it may seem to be a prickly kind of pleasure.
AWARD JUDGE: Eileen Myles
This year, 4x4 turns four years old. We’re four-cubed, a magazine in three dimensions. We feel the work in this issue of the magazine exemplifies the transformative power of literature - its push to a politics that is comfortable being uncomfortable.
AWARD JUDGES: Colm Tóibín and Saskia Hamilton
While this slender, square magazine looks much the same as our past issues, we see Volume 3 as a turning point, an indication of how much we’ve grown and developed as a collective.
AWARD JUDGE: Rowan Ricardo Phillips
We wish that, along with offering you this magazine, we could invite you to witness the incredible and consuming process that went into constructing it. Please read and share, as we have.
AWARD JUDGE: Ben Fountain
In September 2013, we began to discuss if and how we could create a new literary magazine. A few weeks later, we brought together twelve editors in a small room to pick a name for our endeavor. And so 4x4 Magazine was born.
AWARD JUDGE: Joyce Carol Oates