Article Archive: News and Trends

Not unlike European explorers five hundred years ago, the United States publishing industry is looking for a route to China. And, like those explorers, each company seems to be setting a different course.

Last year a total of 172,000 books were published in the United States. Although that number reflects a 10 percent decrease from the previous year, it's easy to see how any one book could get lost in the shuffle—especially if it's one among the many memoirs being published every season. With the idea that there's strength in numbers, four memoirists who published books earlier this year have joined forces to promote their titles, developing a community of like-minded authors—and fostering emerging writers—along the way.

When fiction writer Barry Eisler heard last summer that Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, California, would close after fifty years in business, his first reaction was a loud expletive. His second was an e-mail to owner Clark Kepler with an offer to help. "I used to see those big author photos in the window…and I was working on what would become my first novel," says Eisler, the author of the Jain Rain series of thrillers. "My fantasies of literary success were all based on doing book signings at Kepler's."

A decade after the founding of Cave Canem, Eady speaks about the ways in which the organization has developed into a "safe haven for black poets."

Taking cues from Letters to a Young Poet, published more than seventy years ago, the Letters to Poets project puts an updated spin on Rilke’s experiment in mentorship with organized correspondence between two distinct types of poets.

Two weeks after he was chosen to succeed Ted Kooser as poet laureate, Donald Hall spoke about his newfound responsibilities.

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, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the Iowa Review, and Speakeasy.

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Seal Press and Bear Star Press.

This installment of Page One features excerpts from The Exquisite by Laird Hunt and A Three Dog Life by Jack Pendarvis.

A computer programmer and former employee of Houghton Mifflin launches Library Thing, a Web site designed to re-create library-gazing online.

During her third month on the job, Jacobs spoke about her new position as executive director of the oldest independent publisher of women's writing in the world.

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 Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, Fence, Harpur Palate, Slate, and Ellipsis.