Based on its doodle-y typeface and the snapshot of a young woman in a red wig on the homepage, one might think that the mini-Mag was a light-hearted, slightly dopey online literary magazine. One would only be partly wrong. The mini-Mag is light in spirit, but serious in terms of its mission: to publish writers whose work is 'outside the ordinary'. Exactly what that means is up to the reader to conjecture. Editor August Highland's bio states that he invented 'Mediated Narrative Repatterning' and 'Formal Spam', but the site shows no particular leanings toward avant-garde writings or hyper-lit. Mainly, Highland wishes to avoid easy categorization, and in fact many entries are quite traditional. What makes this site so compelling is its international scope. The easily navigable pages contain work from all over the world and in different languages. The mini-Mag may yet be 'mini' in size, but it compensates with the scale of its ambition. - Claire Barliant