Small Press Points
Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Borealis Books, Passager Books, and Gorsky Press.
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Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Borealis Books, Passager Books, and Gorsky Press.

From the Paris Review’s new offices in lower Manhattan, Philip Gourevitch spoke about the past and future of what Time called “the biggest ‘little magazine’ in history.”
Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer excerpts from Water’s Leaves and Other Poems by Geoffrey Nutter and Pieces of Air in the Epic by Brenda Hillman.

Much has been written about some judges rewarding friends and former students, and I worry that a few questionable practices have detracted from the hundreds of contests that bring recognition to so many well-deserving writers. Nevertheless, there are steps that all of us—editors, judges, and writers—can take to help keep contests clean.
The 2005 Booker Prize longlist of 17 semi-finalists was recently announced. The £50,000 (approximately $90,600) prize, sponsored by the Man Group investment company, is given for the best novel of the year by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or Ireland.
The Washington Post recently published an Editor’s Note apologizing for its negative review of John Irving’s novel Until I Find You (Random House).
Six fiction writers were recently named to the 2005 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize shortlist.
Perhaps because many writers and their adherents are poorly paid and often go unrecognized, they cultivate a variety of myths—some about the creative process, others about the profession itself—to justify what they do, to cheer themselves up, to inhabit a mystique.
In case anyone was wondering, the four most frequently used words in T.S. Eliot’s 1943 collection Four Quartets are “time,” “past,” “fire,” and “end.” It is this kind of information that can be found by using one of several new features recently added to Amazon.com’s “Search Inside the Book” function, launched in October 2003.

Unfortunately, these days it is not the quality of the award-winning writing that gets people talking; it is the way in which contests are run and the manner in which winners are chosen—or not chosen, as the case may be—that attract attention.