Article Archive

The second annual Story Prize ceremony, held at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in late January, began like most literary events in New York City—with much chattering among publishing folk, rising in volume until the lights went down and a hush descended on the room. The evening’s format was simple. The three finalists, fiction writers Jim Harrison, Maureen F. McHugh, and Patrick O’Keefe, would each read from their books and then sit for a short discussion with Larry Dark. In 2004 Dark, the former O. Henry Prize Stories series editor, launched the prize with Julie Lindsey in an effort to promote a genre they believed was underrepresented by other literary awards. The winner of the first annual prize was Edwidge Danticat for The Dew Breaker (Knopf, 2004).

Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features the Paris Review, A Public Space, lyric, Saranac Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Red River Review, the Canary, and River Styx.

In five books written within the past eleven years, incuding The Last of Her Kind, Sigrid Nunez has obscured and sometimes just ignored traditional distinctions of genre by blending elements of fiction and autobiography. 

This installment of Page One features excerpts from Parallel Play by Stephen Burt and The Thin Place by Kathryn Davis.

Can political fiction matter? Stephen Elliott, the editor of Politically Inspired, an anthology published by MacAdam/Cage in 2003, and its follow-up, Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction, published by MacAdam/Cage this month, casts his vote in the “definitely yes” column.

The University of Georgia Press recently revoked the 2004 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction given to Brad Vice of Starkville, Mississippi, for his short story collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, which was published in September 2005, after learning that one of the stories contained uncredited material from Carl Carmer’s Stars Fell on Alabama, a book of nonfiction published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1934 and later reprinted by the University of Alabama Press.

Joining the ranks of literary contests that have failed to yield a winner, Winnow Press is the latest sponsor to announce that the manuscripts received for their First Book Award were not up to par; they are, however, offering something of a consolation prize.

In August, Amazon.com launched a program that offers customers short stories and essays in a digital format for forty-nine cents each.

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Other Voices Books, Soho Press, Paris Press, Curbstone Press, Limberlost Press, Aralia Press, Ugly Ducking Presse, A Rest Press, and Atelos.

Images from a new collection of graphic art by Chip Kidd, an associate art director at Knopf, who has designed nearly eight hundred book jackets for the publishing house during the last twenty years.

Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features Poetry Northwest, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Fence, Black Clock, Ninth Letter, and Eleven Eleven.

Fifty years later, a number of organizations are planning special events on October 7 to commemorate the anniversary of Ginsberg's legendary reading.