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Black Sparrow Press, based in Santa Rosa, California, began in 1966 as a vehicle for John Martin to publish the work that he loved, but went on to become a financial success. It published more than 650 titles, with annual sales eventually rising to more than $1 million, which is why it came as a surprise to many in the publishing industry when Black Sparrow went out of business last spring.
Over three hundred poems, short stories, and essays written in response to the events of last September have been collected in three new anthologies: September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets, and 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11.
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 One Story, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Agni, Ploughshares, Poetry, Blackbird, and Creative Nonfiction.
The BBC World Service recently launched what could be the world's largest book club. Each month a new book of fiction will be selected, and a live discussion, led by Harriett Gilbert, will be broadcast to the BBC's radio audience of 150 million listeners on six continents.
The nominees for the 2002 Man Booker Prize were recently announced. The annual prize is given for the best novel published in the current year and is open to writers from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the British Commonwealth.
Witnesses looked on in anguish as the murky flood waters of the Vltava River surged over Prague, one of the world’s greatest literary cities-home of Kafka, Kundera, Hrabal, and Havel.
The 16th annual Paris Writers Workshop wrapped up on July 5 after a week-long schedule of workshops, lectures, readings, and walking tours.
In January, National Geographic Books launched a series that offers a different kind of travel book—one that uses the unique perspective of a writer to explore the larger implications of place.
Writers, publishers, and bookstore owners who have profited a great deal from the success of Oprah's Book Club reeled from the announcement on April 5 that Oprah Winfrey had made her last monthly book club selection, for nothing else could elevate a book to the status of best-seller quite like it.
This is not an essay. Though maybe, in a way, it is. Because it's a strange thing about essays—even talking about them, trying to get at what they are, it's hard not to cleave to the spirit of the essay, that inconclusive, most outwardly formless of forms, which spills and seeps into so many other kinds of writing-memoir, feature, commentary, review—and punctuates every assertion with a qualification, a measure of doubt, an alternate possibility.
