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The modern Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the country east of Israel, stretches from the southern hills of Syria to the Red Sea. The capital city of Amman, shown here, is the political, cultural, and commercial center, with a population of approximately three million people.
At a November 2011 performance on the Murphey School Radio Show, a cross between the Grand Ole Opry and A Prairie Home Companion in Orange County, North Carolina, poet Alan Shapiro read the poem "Sick Bed." Shapiro's latest book is Night of the Republic, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt last month.
Amazon takes a jab at Apple's iPad in a new advertisement; the history, appeal, and common disdain of listening to audio books; the competitive nature of landing a job with one of the "big six" publishing houses; and other news.
Valentine's Day isn't until next Tuesday, but some particularly amorous books (and booksellers) at Skylight Books in Los Angeles are already in the mood. Enjoy!
The Pushcart Prizes, given annually since 1976 for poems, stories, and essays published by literary magazines and indie outfits, purport to highlight the "best of the small presses" in a yearly anthology.
Looking to apply some objective analysis to the results (and determine, by Pushcart standards, where his own fiction might be in the most distinguished company), one writer has taken to tracking winning venues over the years.
Since 2008 Clifford Garstang, author of the story collection In an Uncharted Country (Press 53, 2009) and editor of Prime Number Magazine, has looked back at the past ten years of Pushcart anthologies and calculated the most-honored magazines, using a system that awards points for Pushcart wins and honorable mentions. The results for 2012, broken out by genre, were reported last week his Perpetual Folly blog.
This year's tally saw Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and Southern Review taking top slots across all three genres, with Conjunctions ranking in the top five in both fiction and nonfiction. Poetry was the front-runner in its genre of specialization. Big movers in fiction, in relation to Garstang's 2011 rankings, were A Public Space and One Story. In nonfiction, Harvard Review and n+1 made jumps this year, tied for thirty-second place. (Small presses make a lesser showing, though BOA Editions holds the fifteenth spot in poetry.)
Garstang admits that ten-year retrospective he takes naturally favors older journals, as well as magazines that appear in print (only one online journal was highlighted in the 2012 award anthology). "Pushcart has for several years been criticized for discriminating against online magazines," Garstang writes on his blog. "Online magazines have made some inroads in the annual volume. I expect this will accelerate and the problem will correct itself. We shall see. In the meantime, for those of us who submit work to online journals—some of which are excellent—we have to look elsewhere for measures of quality."
For more information about the 2012 Pushcart Prize anthology, visit the prize website.
A growing number of bookstores are joining Barnes & Noble's boycott of Amazon Publishing; Syrian author Khaled Khalifa writes of the current situation in his home country; Jason Diamond shares the hazards of moving from part-time barista to full-time writer; and other news.
Amaranth Borsuk's Between Page and Screen, forthcoming from Siglio Press, is an "augmented-reality" book of poems. Think of it as a digital pop-up book: Get a copy of the book (or print out a preview and try it for free at betweenpageandscreen.com), turn on your computer's webcam, and the animations will appear on your screen.
The Chicago Police Department has begun a voluntary writing workshop for officers; Melissa Febos interviews poet and professional dog trainer Susie DeFord about the pros and cons of self-publishing; ten suggested pairings of local craft beers with independent bookshops; and other news.
Using Lorrie Moore's "How To Be An Other Woman" from Self-Help (Knopf, 1985) as inspiration, turn a personal experience into a twelve- (or more) step, how-to manual. The piece can be a simple enumerated list, or it can be more detailed, conveying a broader story; but use the second-person, and keep it instructional.
"Then a Ploughman said / Speak to us of Work." This video showing the process of printing a short excerpt from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet may be a wee bit slow at times, but what did you expect? It's letterpress!
