Article Archive: News and Trends

The latest casualty in the ongoing siege of academic presses and literary magazines in the economic downturn was recorded last fall when Northwestern University announced plans to end the forty-five-year run of its prize-winning journal TriQuarterly as a print publication. After the magazine's final print issue this spring, it will become an online-only, student-run publication.

She Writes, a Web site established for women writers, has joined the ranks of literary social networking utilities. Launched in June it aims to provide a place "where women writers working in every genre, in every part of the world, and of all ages and backgrounds, can come together in a space of mutual support."

With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including  Jarvis Jay Masters's That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row and Laura van den Berg's What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features BlazeVOX Books in Buffalo.

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 Melancholy Dane, Isotope, Our Stories, Puerto del Sol, the Collagist, Alimentum, Crab Creek Review, and Forklift, Ohio.

A look at engravings by Barry Moser that appear in the collection Mark Twain's Book of Animals, published last month by the University of California Press and featuring stories by Twain that have never before appeared in print.

Associate director Martin Riker speaks about developments at Dalkey Archive, the independent press that recently announced a new distribution deal with Norton and the launch of a new European fiction anthology this fall.

BookCrossing, the online community whose members tag, release, and then track books in 160 countries, recently joined Better World Books, a socially conscious Indiana-based retailer, in a partnership that highlights the literary, social, and environmental missions of both sites.

This month Oxford University Press is publishing the world's most comprehensive thesaurus. The two-volume, 4,448-page Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary is not only twice the size of Roget's version, the current standard, but it also lays claim to being the first historical thesaurus compiled for any language.

Almost a decade after its creation, the experimental poetry movement Flarf—in which poets prowl the Internet using random word searches, e-mail the bizarre results to one another, then distill the newly found phrases into poems that are often as disturbing as they are hilarious—is showing signs of having cleared a spot among the ranks of legitimate art forms.