I'll start with other literary magazines, such as Selected Magazines. Elsewhere, it has been asked what the criteria for the selection of works in the *Selected Journals are. Actually, I can't answer this question. But I feel that as long as a writer frequently appears in major literary magazines, he will most likely appear in "** Selected Magazines".
From the aesthetic point of view of "Harvest", many of the works in "Selected Magazines" are very ordinary. There is also a micro ** column on the selected magazine, and that column is even worse. I don't look at micro ** at all.
The reason why "Harvest" is so powerful is not entirely because the editors of the magazine are very powerful, mainly because the magazines publish the works of cultural bigwigs and bigwig students. Can the big guy's work not be amazing? Even if it is not at the top level, it is definitely better than the works in magazines such as "Beijing Literature" and "Frontier Literature". If you buy "Harvest", it is equivalent to going to Beijing to eat roast duck, or other time-honored delicacies. Of course, the food is not necessarily top-notch, but it certainly isn't average.
In this year's "Harvest" literary list, several articles are selected from "Harvest" in its own magazine, including "To the Cloud" by Xu Yigua, which is commented by literary critics, and you can see the screenshots. The comment in the screenshot, in my vernacular, may mean that the author uses a naïve child with autism to contrast the ugliness of the world. Use the magnificence of the clouds to contrast the unhappiness of the world. **The focus is on depicting all kinds of fantastical and treacherous clouds, as well as the subtle psychology of people.
Go to the cloud", in my opinion, is more general, and there is nothing particularly outstanding. This kind of contrasting technique, using the beautiful to contrast the ugly, many writers will do this trick. For example, Sun Pin, she should use mountain people to contrast the materialism of the city.
Of course, "Harvest" selects excellent works from major literary magazines every year, and in fact, it cannot be every year. So I'll just take a look.