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Articles from Poet & Writers Magazine include material from the print edition plus exclusive online-only material.
Against a backdrop of snowfall and accompanied by the jazz strains of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” a memorial service for the legendary W. W. Norton editor Carol Houck Smith, who died late last year at the age of eighty-five, was held recently at St. Peter’s Church in New York City.
Award-winning poet Lucia Perillo would just as soon surrender the idea of a readership altogether and focus on what truly matters—great poetry.
What began for Robin Romm as an exercise in navigating the loss of her mother evolved into a memoir, The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks, published this month by Scribner. She recently spoke about transitioning from fiction to nonfiction, and back again, and the difficulty of releasing a memoir into the world.
On a morning marked with the waving of tiny American flags and tears running down cold cheeks, friends and family and strangers hugged each other for warmth and in celebration—all of us united under a banner of words.
The literary lineage of those who pursue medicine and also write is long and well known, with Anton Chekhov, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, William Carlos Williams, Mikhail Bulgakov, John Keats, and W. Somerset Maugham as standouts through history. But even among contemporary writers of fiction, doctors continue to hold their own.
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 Farmhouse Magazine, the Atlanta Review, Tin House, theVirginia Quarterly Review, Poems Against War, and Poets Against War.
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 Stephanie Kallos's Sing Them Home and Kyle Beachy's The Slide 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 Fact-Simile Editions, Wave Books, and Hol Art Books.
Dan Chiasson, who last fall succeeded former poet laureate Charles Simic as a poetry editor of the Paris Review, recently spoke—by phone from a New York City taxicab—about his new role at the venerable journal.
As the crisis on Wall Street trickles down to Main Street, businesses of all kinds are responding to the gloomy economic climate with a variety of belt-tightening measures. Independent literary publishers are among the smaller, more vulnerable operations that are reacting to real and projected downturns in orders, sales, and, in the case of nonprofit houses, philanthropic giving.
As more readers choose a nifty gadget like the Amazon Kindle over a hefty new hardcover, or a flashy iPhone application such as Stanza over the soft dog-ears of a well-worn paperback, those who still appreciate objects made solely of paper, ink, and glue will likely respond to the work of forty-nine-year-old painter Richard Baker.
Four young literary agents meet for an evening of food, wine, and conversation about the writing they’re looking for, how they’re finding it, what they love, what they hate, and ten things writers should never ever do.
It took three years, but the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Authors Guild, and Google finally resolved a highly publicized dispute about copyright and intellectual property law by agreeing on a $125 million out-of-court settlement that would seem to benefit all parties involved.
Last Thursday Anne Carson collaborated with sculptor Peter Cole, choreographers Jonah Bokaer and Rashaun Mitchell, and dancers from the Merce Cunnigham company to present “Stacks and Bracko.”
On Monday evening the National Book Foundation kicked off National Book Awards week in lower Manhattan with their annual 5 Under 35 celebration. Five young fiction writers, each selected by a former National Book Award winner or finalist, shared the podium to show an audience of peers and admirers—and a few critics—what American fiction has in store.
Just as it's important for aspiring writers to read widely and closely in the genre of their choice, it's equally important to watch videos and trailers for books in that genre and take note of what works and what doesn't. Here are five examples of videos that effectively capture a YouTube viewers' attention.
Getting there may be half the fun, but for Rolf Potts, author of Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, the art of traveling—and travel writing—raises more important questions than how to go from point A to point B.
After a brief but torrential thunderstorm in mid-June, eight writers of poetry and prose, myself included, huddled around a picnic table crowded with three-buck beer and leaves of printed-out poems, stories, and essays in the concrete garden of a Brooklyn bar. It had been almost a year since I'd taken a seat at a table with other writers to talk about the stuff, the meat of our writing and the project at hand every time each of us settles in to confront the blank page.
As the presidential election approaches, our national hand-wringing has ramped up and everyone is once again focused on the perennial question: What makes America America? Two recent literary anthologies show just how far this popular introspection reaches into our creative communities of writers and artists.
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 Robyn Schiff's Revolver and Adam Braver's November 22, 1963, 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 City Lights Publishers, Grove Press, Grove/Atlantic, Atlantic Monthly Press, New Directions, Coffee House Press, Akashic Books, Harbor Mountain Press, Goats and Compasses Press, EM Press, and Perceval Press.
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 GUD, Night Train, Quick Fiction, the New Renaissance, AGNI, Ploughshares, Salamander, Post Road, and the Harvard Review.
Jayne Anne Phillips, who is in her second year as program director of the new MFA program in creative writing at Rutgers University's Newark, New Jersey, speaks about the program's genesis, its connection to Newark's literary and cultural community, and finding the time to complete her new novel.
The story of the Paris Review cofounder Harold Louis "Doc" Humes is at once sad, fascinating, funny, and tragic. Doc, a new documentary by his daughter Immy Humes, which, to use her father's words, "puts a frame around the wreckage" of the story, will premiere on the PBS series Independent Lens on December 9.
The brief, contentious, and ultimately fruitless relationship between poet Stacey Lynn Brown and the editors of Cider Press, points to an essential question that pops up often in literary publishing: Whose opinion—author's or publisher's—should matter most when it comes to finalizing the product that enters the marketplace as a book?
