Article Archive

Nat Sobel, one of the most forward-thinking and outspoken agents in the business, voices his opinions on what authors should do for themselves, the dangers of MFA programs, and what he finds in literary magazines.

Speculation and rumor continue to drive the gossip surrounding Tom Wolfe’s and Richard Ford’s decisions to leave their former publishing houses, but their true reasons remain a mystery.

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features BOA Editions, Ltd., Four Way Books, Wave Books, Anhinga Press, Copper Canyon Press, Margie/IntuiT House, Graywolf Press, and Cy Gist Press.

Beijing, despite its cheap food and beer—two dollars worth of Chinese yuan will buy you a nice Chinese meal or a twelve-pack of Tsingtao beer—has yet to become the Paris of the 21st century, but an expat fiction scene is beginning to emerge.

The first time my then-fiancée mentioned Shanghai, China, and our future in the same sentence, we were canoodling in our favorite pizza place in Massachusetts. I, wildly in love, responded to the possibility with nothing more than a slight pause. “Move to China?” I asked. “Sure, why not!”

Five years ago, as poets and readers attended the annual StAnza poetry festival, the war began in Iraq. This year’s festival, held from March 12 to March 16, acknowledged that anniversary explicitly with its two themes, “Poetry & Conflict” and “Sea of Tongues.”

Throughout his long career, Philip Levine has established a reputation for poems honoring the working class, beginning with the people he encountered as a young man laboring in the factories of Detroit. Though he has taught in writing programs nationwide since the 1950s, his poetry has maintained a stronger identification with the autoworker than the academic. Poets & Writers Magazine asked Levine, who turned eighty in January, how his writing is going these days.

With nearly four decades of editing experience, publishing veteran Pat Strachan reveals the qualities she looks for in fiction, her approach to editing, and how writers can help themselves navigate the industry.

Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer excerpts from New Collected Poems by Eavan Boland and The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips. 

“Can you really teach creative writing?” Professor and novelist Dan Barden answers this while offering his own unorthodox approaches to teaching a workshop.

A look at Jellyfish, winner of best debut feature at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and written and directed by Etgar Keret, an Israeli fiction writer, whose most recent collection of stories, The Girl on the Fridge, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.