The Burnaway Reader is an annual print publication that features long-form essays, interviews, artist projects, and other stories related to the magazine’s three annual themes. After a brief period of print publishing from 2013-2014, Burnaway revived the Reader in 2019 with an ambitious new format and scope. Each year, the Burnaway Reader creates a physical record of the organization’s online publishing and provides an opportunity to commission ambitious new, print-exclusive projects.
What does it mean to be lured in and how do you discern when it’s best to wait or bite? In this fifth edition of Burnaway’s print publication titled by hook—drawn from the phrase “by hook or by crook”—we contemplate dubious choices, examine inherited histories, and grapple with shifty codependence between people and place in the region. Printed in hues of blue and addressing our 2023 editorial themes, Conspiracy, Camouflage, and Current, by hook continues the evolution of Burnaway’s print publication. A form of bait itself, the texts spotlight the American South’s double-edged landscape through fourteen writers’ personal and social deep-dives.
Included in this volume are stories on the existence of AI-generated paradigms in conversation within the work of Houston-born artist Gray Foy; Suzanne Césaire’s writing legacy in the Lesser Antilles; the speculative creative practice of Firelei Báez and the Ciguapa as an undaunted state of being on view in Arkansas; yard shows in Mississippi and the late Mary Tillman Smith; Mel Chin and the Audubon in the region; a tantalizing performance by Thew Smoak through the North Carolina woods; futurists and fortune-tellers in the form of New Orleans artist and writer Kristina Kay Robinson and Demian DinéYazhi’; desperation in the music of a pop singer-songwriter from Florida; and an exclusive poster insert by Atlanta-based artist Kelly Taylor Mitchell.
Existing between the space occupied by periodicals, academic journals, and art objects, by hook covers thirteen states plus the Caribbean, and is carried by public and private universities, large-scale institutions, DIY spaces, private collectors, and a thoughtful, curious cultural audience.
If you would like to pre-order by hook for wholesale, please email [email protected].
Previous editions of the Burnaway Reader are available for purchase in our Shop.
Current and former stockists of the Burnaway Reader include:
Atlanta Contemporary
Birmingham Museum of Art
Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center
Charis Books and More
The Concern Newsstand
For Keeps Bookstore
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
QuickQuick (closed)
Whitney Museum of American Art