Toronto is in the midst of an indie magazine renaissance

Last week, Toronto’s literati celebrated the emergence of not one but two brand-new independent magazines, which held duelling launch parties down the street from one another on Geary Avenue.

The launch of Sorry, at Paradise Grapevine, felt almost like a wedding—with fairy lights, luxe charcuterie boards and a multi-generational crowd of supporters toasting the achievement. The party spilled onto the street as author Marlowe Granados took to the improvised stage to read a sprawling story on Three Speed and the city’s strip clubs in winter.

Related: What’s on the menu at Paradise Grapevine’s new patio on Geary

Over at Cafeteria, the digital launch of Toronto Review felt more like a school dance, held in a gymnasium-like room with wooden floors, a stage and lopsided curtains. The crowd buzzed with anticipation as attendees waited for local literary stars Cason Sharpe and Claudia Dey to take the stage. After the readings, the party drifted downstairs and the energy shifted from scholarly to revelry with dancing, DJs, and temporary tattoos glistening on collarbones and midriffs.

Sorry and Toronto Review join two more new local magazines, Orbital Studies and Lore, adding to a flourishing independent literary scene that celebrates creativity above all. We spoke with the founders about the future of publishing and what it’s like to launch a magazine in the TikTok era.

Related: Toronto’s Best-Dressed—Claudia Dey and Heidi Sopinka

Sorry

Put simply, Sorry is “a magazine about Toronto,” says editor-in-chief Alex Robert Ross, a writer with bylines in Pitchfork and Vice. Originally from England, Ross noticed after moving here in 2020 that there was a chasm between the sheepish way Torontonians talked about their hometown and their fierce loyalty to the city.

So, alongside graphic designer Ian Wood, and publisher Jaime Eisen (who is married to Ross), he decided to create a love letter to Toronto in the form of a magazine. A call for pitches yielded, among others, a story about the surprising local origins of sushi pizza and a long-form personal essay by India Sawh on processing grief at Dufferin Mall. “We know dozens of brilliant, creative people who’ve left, usually for New York or Los Angeles, because they feel they’ve topped out here, and we wanted to argue against that,” Ross says.

Looking ahead, Ross isn’t interested in chasing growth. Instead, he just wants to provide a platform for creative people in the city to showcase what they do best. “There are great writers and editors and creative people of all kinds in this city,” he says, “and it’s long overdue to have a project come along that helps catalyze and build community around that.”

Toronto Review

In April of 2025, a group of literary-minded friends gathered at critic Tia Glista’s house for a dinner party. As guests trickled out, discussion turned toward the lack of a Canadian venue for the kind of staunch literary criticism they wanted to write and read. “We were venting the difficulty of placing coverage we felt was integral to the literary scene in Canada,” says co-founder Adrianna Michell. The more the remaining six spoke about it, the clearer their vision became—so they decided to create Toronto Review, a magazine that takes criticism seriously.

The editorial team is comprised of Emma Cohen, a writer and co-organizer of the reading series Pack Animal; Winnie Wang, a writer, film programmer and cultural critic; Abby Lacelle, co-founder of Paloma Magazine; Sonja Katanic, a graphic designer; and critics Adrianna Michell and Tia Glista.

“Our goal is to foster local writers’ voices and shine a spotlight on work by Canadian creatives while creating a hub to connect readers with what is happening in Toronto’s vibrant literary scene,” says Michell. “Critics serve to promote, to complicate and to elevate a reading experience.”

The first issue contains an essay by author Haley Mlotek wrestling with Toronto-based filmmaker Sophy Romvari’s Blue Heron; a review of the hotly discussed new Ben Lerner novel, Transcription; and a behind-the-scenes look at the writing of his debut novel, Fancy Gap, by Zak Jones. The magazine is online only and plans to publish one to two new stories a week.

Orbital Studies

“We want to create a place for folks who long for a more beautiful scientific culture,” says Orbital Studies founder Xavier Snelgrove, whose magazine launches May 6. A computer scientist and researcher, Snelgrove felt that the academic approach to STEM lacked the rich humanistic and philosophical range found in the humanities, so he decided to create a new magazine in an attempt to bridge the two spheres.

He sees the magazine as responding to a world of mediocrity propelled by AI. “I think there’s a hunger to get off our screens and to decelerate,” says Snelgrove. “Lovers of language are looking for new venues that are skilfully curated and less algorithmically mediated in order to discover beautiful new expressions of thought. We are seeking sanctuary in an increasingly surveilled, increasingly algorithmically optimized, corporate milieu.”

In the first issue, photographs by artist Sara Angelucci—intricate botanicals scanned at high resolution—perfectly illustrate this vision. Angelucci uses the natural world as a basis for larger questions about digital reproduction and what it means to belong.

Snelgrove is self-funding the project and plans to publish just two issues a year for the next several years. “We aim to find and cultivate our community of readers, and our community of contributors, and get to a place of financial sustainability,” he says.

Lore

Lore is arguably the trailblazer that kicked off this new wave of the indie magazine trend, publishing its first issue in May 2024. Creative consultant Isaac Nikolai Fox and account executive Katie Glancy—who also runs the meme account @TorontoAffirmations—initially conceived of the project as a way to build their own like-minded creative community in Toronto.

“Lore always leans toward the light, even when we’re exploring a serious theme like cults or secrets,” says Fox. “The world’s a dark place, and we try to create space for new joy.” Articles skew bizarre, including a story about a sapphic cat cult and a fashion photoshoot with Vic McNabb, the woman behind the Toronto meme account City Pool Warrior.

Fox attributes the surplus of new magazines to our current malaise around screens, social media and AI. “We all know doomscrolling isn’t healthy and would much rather be in a room with real people,” he says. “You just don’t make core memories looking at a screen. You make them when you’re taking creative risks. You make them when you throw parties. You make them when you try something completely new, not knowing if it’s going to pan out or not. Making a magazine is just a really good excuse for all that.”

In just two years, Lore has managed to find stockists across North America, Europe and East Asia—and even nabbed a 2026 National Magazine Award nomination for best magazine in the art, literature and culture category. Fox’s ultimate goal is for the mag to achieve international recognition while retaining its scrappy Canadian ethos.