It began: Tired of the spectacle of short stories, novels, poems and plays still under the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive naturalism, and desirous of crystallizing a viewpoint...

[7] Transition stories, a 1929 selection by E. Jolas and R. Sage from the first thirteen numbers featured: Gottfried Benn, Kay Boyle (Polar Bears and Others), Robert M. Coates (Conversations No.

7), Emily Holmes Coleman (The Wren's Nest), Robert Desnos, William Closson Emory (Love in the West), Léon-Paul Fargue, Konstantin Fedin, Murray Goodwin, (A Day in the Life of a Robot), Leigh Hoffman (Catastrophe), Eugene Jolas (Walk through Cosmopolis), Matthew Josephson (Lionel and Camilla), James Joyce (A Muster from Work in Progress), Franz Kafka (The Sentence), Vladimir Lidin, Ralph Manheim (Lustgarten and Christkind), Peter Negoe (Kaleidoscope), Elliot Paul (States of Sea), Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Robert Sage (Spectral Moorings), Kurt Schwitters (Revolution), Philippe Soupault, Gertrude Stein (As a Wife Has a Cow a Love Story).

Some other artists, authors and works published in transition included Samuel Beckett (Assumption, For Future Reference), Kay Boyle (Dedicated to Guy Urquhart), H. D. (Gift, Psyche, Dream, No, Socratic), Max Ernst (Jeune Filles en des Belles Poses, The Virgin Corrects the Child Jesus before Three Witnesses), Stuart Gilbert (The Aeolus Episode in Ulysses, Function of Words, Joyce Thesaurus Minusculus), Juan Gris (Still Life), Ernest Hemingway (Three Stories, Hills like White Elephants), Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis), Alfred Kreymborg (from: Manhattan Anthology), Pablo Picasso (Petite Fille Lisant), Muriel Rukeyser (Lover as Fox), Gertrude Stein (An Elucidation, The Life and Death of Juan Gris, Tender Buttons, Made a Mile Away), William Carlos Williams (The Dead Baby, The Somnambulists, A Note on the Recent Work of James Joyce, Winter, Improvisations, A Voyage to Paraguay).

[7] Also Paul Bowles, Bob Brown, Kathleen Cannell, Malcolm Cowley, Hart Crane, Abraham Lincoln Gillespie Jr. (on music), Eugene Jolas (also as Theo Rutra), Marius Lyle, Robert McAlmon, Archibald McLeish Allen Tate; Bryher, Morley Callaghan, Rhys Davies, Robert Graves, Sidney Hunt, Robie Macauley, Laura Riding, Ronald Symond, Dylan Thomas.

26, 1937, with a Marcel Duchamp cover, featured Hans Arp, Man Ray, Fernand Léger, László Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Alexander Calder and others.

A third to half the space in the early years of transition was given to translations, some of which done by Maria McDonald Jolas; French writers included: André Breton, André Gide and the Peruvian Victor Llona ; German and Austrian poets and writers included Hugo Ball, Carl Einstein, Yvan Goll, Rainer Maria Rilke, René Schickele, August Stramm, Georg Trakl; Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Yiddish, and Native American texts were also translated.

While transition was foremost a literary review, it also featured avant-garde visual art beginning with its inaugural issue (April 1927), which included reproductions of paintings by Max Ernst, Lajos Tihanyi, and Pavel Tchelitchew.

While the periodical's cover initially bore only textual elements, commencing with the thirteenth issue Jolas began to feature art on the outside of his publication as well–much of it created specifically for transition.

In the order of their appearance, the magazine's covers included art by Pablo Picasso, Stuart Davis, Man Ray, Gretchen Powel, Kurt Schwitters, Eli Lotar, Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, and Wassily Kandinsky.

[11] Similarly, Jolas obtained a number of the reproductions of Surrealist paintings and objects that appeared in the magazine's first two years–including work by Yves Tanguy, who was little known at the time–by way of his friend Marcel Noll, who was director of the Galerie Surréaliste until it closed in 1928.