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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 Aracelis Girmay’s Kingdom Animalia, and Tomaž Šalamun’s The Blue Tower, 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 Exterminating Angel Press, the six-year-old independent book publisher with a big mission: to challenge the received cultural narrative.
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 Memoir (and), Harvard Review, Huizache, the Coffin Factory, Monday Night, and Ploughshares.
The inspired world of Steve Jobs, through the eyes of his novelist sister; Ireland elects a poet president; Barnes and Noble expands e-book real estate; T. S. Eliot and Groucho Marx, penpals; and other news.
Writers from the San Francisco Bay area have signed a petition denouncing Oakland's recent actions toward protestors; literary agent Ira Silverberg will be the new literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts; Philip K. Dick's estate has filed a lawsuit against the makers of the film The Adjustment Bureau; and other news.
E-bookseller Kobo will create a publishing division; the Chicago Tribune is planning a standalone books section; writers Walter Kirn, Steve Martin, Rita Dove, and Amy Tan recently met at a Chinese restaurant in New York City to play poker; and other news.
Melville House publisher, Dennis Johnson, adds his voice to the ongoing debate over the future of publishing; Occupy Wall Street has created a poetry anthology; Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison has written a new play, Desdemona, that speaks to Shakespeare's Othello; and other news.
Writer Paul Malmont is promoting a holiday book drive to send reading material to troops; Africa's most influential celebrity is novelist Chinua Achebe; novelist Shalom Auslander solicits John Hodgman, Sarah Vowell, and Ira Glass for a huge favor; and other news.
Frieda Hughes, the daughter of Sylvia Plath and the late British poet Ted Hughes, writes of her mother's drawings; novelist Curtis Sittenfeld interviews Lan Samantha Chang, the director of the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop; literary journal n+1 has created a new publication, Occupy; and other news.
The San Diego City College International Book Fair, which took place in San Diego, California, October 3 to 8, featured P&W-supported writers Cris Mazza, Wanda Coleman, Austin Straus, Christopher Buckley, and Laurel Corona.
Maybe it’s because she grew up in a family of “hunters and gatherers” in the wilder parts of San Diego County that fiction writer Cris Mazza espouses a “stone soup” approach to writing. In other words, she welcomes the happy accidents that find their way into her work and is amused by the prospect of literary critics mining her pages for symbolism.
Mazza, reading from her novel Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls, was one of more than fifteen writers to present their work at the sixth annual San Diego City College International Book Fair, which took place on the community college campus. Though small compared to mega-festivals like the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the City Book Fair earns the title of “International” by emphasizing writing from the U.S./Mexico border. City Works Press, a local collective based at San Diego City College (SDCC), recently published Wounded Border/Frontera Herida: Readings on the Tijuana /San Diego Region and Beyond.
Social justice is a common theme in the work of City Book Fair writers. Mazza’s latest novel chronicles the risks taken by trafficked sex workers who serve migrant farm workers in the fields. Mazza said she hoped to bring awareness to the problem. “I usually write something when I’m troubled [by an issue], not inspired,” she said. “But maybe they’re kind of the same thing.” 
However, she admitted that she didn’t have any illusions about the power of fiction to stop what government and law enforcement haven’t been able to.
Later in the afternoon on October 8 (the main day of the festival), poet Wanda Coleman alluded to the Occupy San Diego protests happening downtown. Her dynamic voice and musical riffs rang through the auditorium as she bellowed, “It’s way too late—we should have protested the Civil War.”
Other readers and panelists included poet Austin Straus, novelist Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and poet and nonfiction writer Luis Rodriguez, who drew a large crowd that included many young Latino SDCC students. Outside the auditorium, visitors browsed at booths operated by small presses and independent bookstores. A few blocks away, a crowd of protesters—accompanied by a handful of babies and dogs—held up signs saying “End War, Feed the Poor” and “Trickle down?! It NEVER RAINS in Southern California!”
Photos: (Top) P&W staff member Jamie FitzGerald (in hat) with bookfair attendees. Credit: Cheryl Klein; (bottom) Austin Straus. Credit: Cheryl Klein.
Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
