Article Archive

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?

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.

As long as there has been war, there have been writers trying to understand it, turning battlefield horrors into narrative, trying to make something useful out of its debris, but in recent months an unusually high number of soldier memoirs have been released by American publishers.

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.

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.

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

This month the Library of America, the nonprofit publisher founded in 1979 to “preserve our nation’s literary heritage,” will release the first two installments of a planned eight-volume edition of Philip Roth’s collected fiction.

Much has been written about some judges rewarding friends and former students, and I worry that a few questionable practices have detracted from the hundreds of contests that bring recognition to so many well-deserving writers. Nevertheless, there are steps that all of us—editors, judges, and writers—can take to help keep contests clean.

During the last three years, some of America’s most respected poets—Richard Wilbur, Mark Strand, and the late Anthony Hecht, among others—have published British editions of their books with Waywiser Press, a virtually unknown publisher based in London. 

At no time on my book tour did I jump up and down, wave my fists, and scream, “It’s a novel! That means fiction!” At least I don’t think I did. It’s hard to be sure, because, in my head, I had that tantrum about three times daily as I traveled from town to town in southern Michigan, reading, signing books, and attending the Ann Arbor Book Festival. You see, my novel, Flight, was set in that region, where I had lived during my high school and college years.

Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer excerpts from Evening Ferry by Katherine Towler and Little Beauties by Kim Addonizio.

In case anyone was wondering, the four most frequently used words in T.S. Eliot’s 1943 collection Four Quartets are “time,” “past,” “fire,” and “end.” It is this kind of information that can be found by using one of several new features recently added to Amazon.com’s “Search Inside the Book” function, launched in October 2003.