This is the Spring 1995 issue from my bookshelf with Alice Munro on the cover. Belles Lettres: A Review Of Books By Women, premiered in 1984 and appears to have ended publication in late 1995 or January, 1996.
For a 2021 Kindle Reprint Edition celebrating Toni Morrison, Gloria Steinem said,
Whenever Belles Lettres arrives in the mail, it’s like greeting a trusted, thoughtful, and well-travelled friend who is going to tell me the books I most want and need to read.
I felt just the same. Another magazine I looked forward to was The Saturday Review of Literature. I have to say, though, just weeks before it folded in June, 1986, I took out a 5-year subscription. That kind of investment was very unusual for me. Bad luck!
The Belles Lettres in my hand right now features books by Alice Munro (Open Secrets), Katha Pollitt (Reasonable Creatures), and Julia Alvarez (In the Time of Butterflies).
In a Belle Lettres interview, Toni Morrison talks about her 1992 historical novel, Jazz:
It was interesting to me how the whole act of reading, holding, surrendering to a book, is part of that beautiful intimacy of reading.
Yes, it is, even in our Digital Age.
Thank you, Toni Morrison, for your books!