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).

In the second half of the twentieth century, a number of poets’ theater programs, including the Poets’ Theatre, which was established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1950, and staged plays by John Ashbery, James Merrill, Frank O’Hara, and Richard Wilbur, provided venues for work written by poets for the stage. Now, a new generation of poets’ theater programs are raising their curtains for plays by poets.

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

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Action Books, Fence Books, Verse Press, Wave Books, Tin House Books, Bloomsbury USA, Twisted Spoon Press, and White Pine Press.

For those who don’t mind Hollywood versions of great literature, a new series of novels packaged with the DVD recordings of the films they inspired allows for a side-by-side comparison.

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.

Whether it’s a thousand-page novel, a single-paragraph story, or a footnoted essay, the elusive author always offers a complicated—and sometimes maddening—reading experience. But is there more to David Foster Wallace than words on a page?

Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer excerpts from The Jungle Law by Victoria Vinton and Mother’s Milk by Edward St. Aubyn.

The eighteen poets featured here represent only a fraction of the debut books published in 2005, yet they are emblematic of the diverse community of poets who have recently forged their own paths to publication.

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.