‘The Believer’ Lit Mag Redesigns, Relaunches its Website

The Believer, the bi-monthly arts, culture and literary magazine, has relaunched its website with plans for direct to online publishing, free access to its extensive archive of interviews and articles, and plans to increase and highlight comics storytelling on the site and in print.

The newly relaunched Believer website provides access to content from the most recent issue of the magazine (issue 119), including essayist Carmen Maria Machado and interviews with memoirist Anne Carson and novelist Paul Beatty.

The redesigned site will now offer free access to The Believer’s vast archive of essays, interviews and excerpts by a stellar cast of writers featured in the magazine over many years. Among the writers and issues now available via the website are Zadie Smith (issue 54), Jonathem Lethem (issue 63), Hilton Als (issue 70), Dave Eggers (issue 11), and Tayari Jones from February 2008.

Kristen Radtke, art director of The Believer and its comics editor, told PW the new website “will make the archive more accessible and allow the magazine to publish material and respond to events, quickly online.”

Radtke also emphasized that The Believer is “expanding our comics reach,” and said that the print magazine will also increase the use of comics in a variety of forms.  The new website will also feature original comics that will only be available online as well providing free access to comics and interviews with comics artists in the archive that have not been available to readers before.

Among the comics artists whose work can be seen on The Believer website are Jennifer Camper, Leela Corman, Ben Passmore (whose story “Blak Flag” is currently featured on the site), Andrea Tsurumi, Amy Kurzweil, Anders Nilsen and Yvan Alagbé. Radtke said the archive will offer strips that have never before been online by Charles Burns, Tom Gauld, Lilli Carre, Michael Deforge, Jonathan Bennett and others. The archive also offers long interviews with Adrian Tomine, Jules Feiffer, Charles Burns, Chris Ware, and more.

The redesign and relaunch of the website are among the latest efforts to refocus the mission of The Believer after the magazine was acquired by the Las Vegas-based Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute from McSweeney’s, its original owner, in 2017.