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In this inaugural installment of our new column, The Contester, devoted to the news and trends of literary contests, we look at Neil Azevedo's Zoo Press, a press that despite being well known for its poetry books and prizes (the Kenyon Review Prize and the Paris Review Prize), hasn't had much luck in the fiction arena.
This month the world’s first independent publisher of women’s writing, the Feminist Press, launches a steamy—and unlikely—series of pulp fiction titles.
A simple film about the solitary pleasures of reading has turned into a successful campaign to revive a short-lived literary career. Dow Mossman’s only novel, The Stones of Summer, was originally published in 1972 by the now-defunct press Bobbs-Merrill. After being lauded by John Seelye in the New York Times Book Review as “a marvelous achievement” that offered “fulfillment at the first stroke, which is so often the sign of superior talent,” the book went out of print and its author faded into obscurity. Last month it was reissued by Barnes & Noble Books.
Australian-born novelist D.B.C. Pierre won the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Vernon God Little, published by Faber & Faber. He received £50,000 (approximately $80,000). Pierre was chosen from a shortlist including Monica Ali, Margaret Atwood, Damon Galgut, Zoë Heller, and Clare Morrall.
Laura Furman, the first female O. Henry series editor in more than forty years, has instituted some changes to the process of selecting stories for her first volume, due out next month from Anchor.
They don’t command the best-seller lists, nor do they show up on reviewers’ desks, but the classics—those books of enduring quality that year after year grace high school and college syllabi and circulate in community book clubs—are the cash cows of the publishing industry: reliable, predictable, and above all, steady sources of revenue. Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, Bantam Classics, Dover Publications, and the Modern Library are among the leading publishers of their kind in the United States. This spring, Barnes & Noble joined them with its own imprint: Barnes & Noble Classics.
Amanda Davis, author of the short story collection Circling the Drain and cornerstone presence to many in and beyond the literary world, died in a plane crash on March 15, 2003, while on tour promoting her first novel, Wonder When You'll Miss Me.
