Article Archive

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 Noelle Kocot's Sunny Wednesday and Jane Vandenbergh's A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century as the starting point for a closer look at these new and noteworthy titles.

April Ossmann, who recently stepped down as executive director of Alice James Books, the Farmington, Maine–based nonprofit cooperative poetry press founded in 1973, spoke about her time at Alice James from her home in Post Mills, a snowy hamlet in eastern Vermont.

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 Normal School, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and Narrative.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.