Article Archive

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.

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 Ninth Letter, Oxford American, and the Literary Review.

Ordering poems becomes a familiar act if you consider the lyric poem in its original form—the song. And if you were the kind of incessant list-maker Nick Hornby describes in his novel High Fidelity, the kind who also made mix tapes from your album collection. If you were the kind of geek my college boyfriend, Tim, was and—admittedly—the kind I was too.

The origin and form of Mayhill Fowler’s Huffington Post report on Barack Obama’s use of the word “bitter” suggest her work is neither blogging nor journalism, but creative nonfiction. That its effect was out of proportion with its intention begs the question: What can the creative nonfiction writer expect in the Information Age?

No two writers write alike, but when two hundred gather for an event—as they did at this year’s Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, held at Christ Church College in Oxford from March 31 through April 6—some common themes tend to emerge.

Ander Monson’s fourth book, the poetry collection Our Aperture, was published in January by New Michigan Press. It’s a short thirty pages, but it further extends the reach of the author’s genre-bending work. Poets & Writers Magazine recently asked Monson about his predilection for playing with genre.

Celebrated short story writer and poet Grace Paley died of cancer last August at the age of eighty-four. A lifelong activist, pacifist, and an early figure in the women’s rights movement in the 1960s, Paley was one of those writers who managed to combine a public life of frequent readings and appearances in support of a range of causes with work lauded for its artistic integrity. We interviewed Paley a little more than a year before her death at her home in Thetford.

The National Endowment for the Arts releases To Read or Not to Read—a follow-up to the nonprofit's 2004 report, Reading at Risk—which further expounds on America's declining reading habits.

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.

The author of four poetry collections talks about his obsession with the unknown and the poem as a descendent of God.