The season of summer reading is approaching, heralded as always by the appearance of some perfect beach fodder: special issues of your favorite magazines. The New Yorker’s Summer Fiction issue is on newstands now, featuring “stories that reflect on life during wartime” — that would be the debacle in Iraq if you’re losing track of which conflict they’re referring to; The Atlantic will have its Fiction Issue on newstands in mid-July with “a combination of stories [including “Horseman” from Richard Russo], as well as essays about the writing world [E. L. Doctorow on “Historical Novels”] augmented with ‘best of’ pieces from the magazine’s archives, in celebration of its 150th year of publishing” (PDF of sell-sheet here).

North of the border, The Walrus is set to launch its Summer Reading issue in Vancouver on June 19 at The Western Front (the release of Noah Richler’s This Is My Country, What’s Yours? will be celebrated simultaneously). And an issue of Geist (#60 is out!) is always rewarding, any season of the year.

Appropriately, the summer issue (#77) of Brick was in our mailbox yesterday: new fiction from Caroline Adderson; Leonard Cohen interviewed (by Shelagh Rogers, but still welcome); a celebration of 40 years of Coach House Press; and much more. I was given a year’s subscription to Brick for Christmas but since they only do two issues a year this was the first one I’d received. Oddly, Brick’s automated subscription reminder mechanism has been set to trigger when a subscriber gets down to two issues remaining; and if you do the math this policy leads to missives badgering you to “Resubscribe!” — before the first issue in your year’s subscription has even arrived. Confusing (and annoying): Bricklings please take note…