Article Archive

Despite worries that digital media sounded the death knell for serious, immersive reading, publishing platforms such as the iPad, Kindle, and Nook have given rise to single-sitting works—longform journalism pieces, single stories, and short novellas—that have broad reader appeal.

Small Press Points highlights the innovative and can-do spirit of independent presses. This issue features Stoneslide Books, a recently launched fiction press looking for narratives that prompt readers “to think, to ask questions, to move the mind forward.”

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 Carmen Bugan’s Burying the Typewriter and Joyelle McSweeney’s Percussion Grenade, as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.

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 Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism, Fairy Tale Review, and Unstuck.

A look at the risks and rewards of book-publication contests, including an overview of the contest model, a breakdown of the budgets behind three major book prizes, the intangible benefits of winning, and an interview with four frequent judges.

In this issue we offer a look at Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt this month. 

Small Press Points highlights the innovative and can-do spirit of independent presses. This issue features Black Balloon Publishing, the New York City–based publisher of “the weird, the unwieldy, the unclassifiable.”

As Tree Swenson prepares to step down after ten years at the helm of the Academy of American Poets in New York City, she speaks about her next role as the executive director of the Richard Hugo House and returning to the Pacific Northwest.

Organizers of writing contests are, perhaps not suprisingly, wary of publicizing details of their budgets, but the organizers of three contest programs offered to share the numbers behind their 2011 contests as part of contributing editor Michael Bourne's “The Economics of Competition,” which serves as the centerpiece of the current issue’s special section on the risks and rewards of writing contests.

The late poet laureate Philip Levine spoke in early 2012 about his plans for the position and the range of influences on his work through the years.