Dear readers, contributors and visitors of Szirine Magazine,

We are currently upgrading our website to Wordpress 2.0.4 and thus not all articles and functionality will be available at the moment. Please bear with us during this migration, we hope to be up and running with an improved site soon.

update (20061203):
Finally, we have transferred all our archive to our new site! Still missing are the comments and the images, but we are nevertheless feeling again a sense of completion. (more…)

I behold Thee, infinite in form, on every side,
but I see not Thy end nor Thy middle, nor Thy beginning![1]

I. Overview

Szirine Magazine is a literary magazine on world cultures and subcultures. We publish fiction, non-fiction, poetry and open form essays in which culture and language play important roles. Szirine Magazine authors convey the distinct localities of their cultures, the poetic spirits of their languages.

Szirine Magazine believes that the interpretation of our observations is heavily influenced by selective perception and limited insight. It takes years of direct participation, often from childhood on, to intrinsically understand a culture and attach an accurate meaning to it. A truthful still description of our own single experience is not always enough to properly depict a shared and living culture. For example, to the outsider, some behaviors may appear exotic or primitive, but to an insider they are sophisticated traditions of deeply held importance. And to the outsider, what may appear as a sophisticated and esthetic custom may to an insider be but unworthy and trivial. In short, the perspective of the outsider, even at best will, can easily misrepresent the indigenous cultures it observes. Szirine Magazine upholds the principle that most often it is the insiderís perspective that can best if not solely examine, express and portray the culture. We are reluctant and careful to accept stories by an outsider who is well intentioned and literary talented, but to a certain extent excluded from the intrinsic workings.

Szirine Magazine constructs a space, a third space (more…)