Article Archive

Sadly, recent revelations are forcing readers—confronted by a brand-new band of literary scallywags, hucksters, and hoaxers—to reconsider the veracity of the story as well as that of the storyteller.

On April 14 hundreds of scholars gathered in the Millennium Hall of the Loews Hotel in Philadelphia for the second day of the thirty-fourth annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, a nonprofit, academic organization devoted to the study of William Shakespeare and his plays and poems.

The author of fifteen books, including eight novels, three short story collections, a memoir, and a ten-volume treatise on the nature and ethics of violence, William T. Vollmann is often associated with his most controversial subjects—crack and prostitution among them. He is also characterized by a few signature stunts, such as firing a pistol during his readings and kidnapping a girl who had been sold into prostitution and turning her over to a relief agency while writing an article for Spin magazine.

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 Fairy Tale Review, Alimentum, Lost, Dislocate, Tameme, Double Change, Storie, and Terra Incognita.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, we present this all-poetry edition of Page One, featuring excerpts from Black Lab by David Young and Drive: The First Quartet by Lorna Dee Cervante.

It used to be that when a writer bestowed human qualities on an animal—the ability to speak, for instance—it almost always meant trouble. Today, animal lit is broader in scope and occasionally even benevolent in nature.

The Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk, New York, gives writers room to write—in one of the most inspiring barns in the country.

Among the many poetry collections that have been published in the weeks leading up to National Poetry Month, Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man, a collaborative book of sestinas by James Cummins and David Lehman released by Soft Skull Press in February, features perhaps the most prestigious and, simultaneously, zany cast of characters to appear in a book of poems since Alan Kaufman's Outlaw Bible of American Poetry was published by Thunder's Mouth Press seven years ago.

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.