What is Brick?

Brick features a great many of the world’s best-loved writers, and has readers in every corner of the planet. Both up-to-date and deeply engaged with what has come before, the magazine prizes the personal voice and celebrates opinion, passion, revelation, and the occasional bad joke. Our goal is to participate, as a Canadian literary presence, in the widest and most galvanizing exploration of the arts possible.

Started in London, Ontario in 1977, and set by hand, the original Brick featured articles and book reviews from writers across Canada and attracted a devoted audience through the diligence and eclectic taste of its founding editors, Stan Dragland and Jean McKay. Now based in Toronto and published biannually, Brick’s mandate remains unchanged: to create a beautiful product filled with the most invigorating and challenging literary essays, interviews, memoirs, travelogues, belles lettres, and unusual musings we can get our hands on.

Brick is published twice a year and distributed to bookstores worldwide.

What they say about us...

Brick is one of the best, if not the best, journals of ideas published in the English-speaking world—a gathering of ideas from writers who think, and thinkers who write, in familiar and popular genres: the old-fashioned book-review, the personal essay and memoir, the interview, letters, even the obituary. As my mother, with undisguised fear, used to say of some of my more vivid friends, Brick has character.

— Russell Banks

Brick is a reader’s and writer’s magazine, that rare ground of common interest and exchange. It’s a remarkable bastion against the blurs and distractions of the all-too-familiar alternatives. Here reading always wins.

— Robert Creeley

I read Brick cover to cover. I save each Brick....Brick represents integrity in publishing. It is also one of two North American magazines that keeps the flame of literature alive. It’s hilarious, too. Pretend it is a MAD Magazine and read the tiniest type.

— Annie Dillard

Brick is the literary journal that makes me simply giddy when it comes—like I’m Krazy Kat, and the magazine is a konk on the head by a beloved mouse.

— Jonathan Lethem

Brick is intelligent and richly figured, a literary magazine for people who think and relish words and the ways they are joined. It sails the sea of letters like a well-built dory.

— Annie Proulx

Brick is a continual source of delight. For its clarity, intelligence, flair. For its breadth of vision, international scope, quirky angles. Brick is Canada’s finest literary magazine.

— Di Brandt

Brick is on its own, a constantly surprising and exciting gathering of literary and visual talents from every direction. I know of no more vital and original literary journal anywhere.

— W. S. Merwin

… so many adventuresome and courageous incursions and crossings of another sort, into stories and thoughts and poems that one could find nowhere else. This is a brick that needs to be heaved right through the windows of every reading mind on the continent.

— Ariel Dorfman

Our Friends

We don't like to brag, but here at Brick we have a lot of great friends.