Little Star featured the work of Derek Walcott, Wisława Szymborska, Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, Ann Beattie, Sigrid Nunez, Charles Simic, Gary Snyder, Marilyn Hacker, Tomasz Różycki, Alice Fulton, Jean Valentine, James Kelman, Padgett Powell, Paul Muldoon, Jamaica Kincaid, Adam Zagajewski, Eliot Weinberger, C. K. Williams, Mark Strand, Caleb Crain, Lydia Davis, Carl Phillips, Joy Williams, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, W. G. Sebald, Durs Grünbein, and Tim Parks, among others.
Little Star Weekly also featured music and art edited by Alex Ross, Mary Weatherford, and John Zinsser, among others.
The magazine is rooted in book culture and the reflective traditions of a number of well-remembered hand-held journals of the past, such as The Criterion, The Partisan Review, Antaeus.
It was the agility of digital reproduction and the reach of literary blogging and social networking that prompted editors to frame a print tradition with mixed-media.
[3] The magazine takes its name from a line from Joseph Brodsky: "But soon, I’m told, I’ll lose my epaulets altogether / and dwindle into a little star.