Article Archive: News and Trends

Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer excerpts from Chemistry and Other Stories by Ron Rash and Music for Landing Planes By by Éireann Lorsung.

Sample art from Bookworm, a collection of photos and collages of books destroyed by nature.

Controversy surrounds Tupelo Press and its 2006 Dorset Prize after allegations of unfairness emerge from contest participants.

Taking their cue from the film industry, in which a well-produced trailer is infinitely more valuable than a print advertisement or press release, commercial publishers such as HarperCollins and Houghton Mifflin are taking advantage of new technology to offer promotional videos on their Web sites to augment their traditional publicity campaigns.

A childhood bike trip leads Whitman impersonator Darrel Blaine Ford to a lifelong dedication to the legendary poet.

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 Oxford American, the Believer, Wholphin, McSweeney's, Rattapallax, the Reader, and Poetry Kanto.

Michael Stephen Fuchs doesn't seem particularly naive or susceptible to exploitation. The fast-talking writer has a successful day job as an Internet consultant, peppers his conversation with literary aphorisms, and, like many debut authors, can talk with an eloquence borne from personal experience about the iniquities of the publishing business. But according to some in the book trade, Fuchs has been suckered.

Not unlike European explorers five hundred years ago, the United States publishing industry is looking for a route to China. And, like those explorers, each company seems to be setting a different course.

The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses unveils the Submission Manager, software used to accept and track online submissions, resulting in less waste and more efficiency for writers and editors alike.

When fiction writer Barry Eisler heard last summer that Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, California, would close after fifty years in business, his first reaction was a loud expletive. His second was an e-mail to owner Clark Kepler with an offer to help. "I used to see those big author photos in the window…and I was working on what would become my first novel," says Eisler, the author of the Jain Rain series of thrillers. "My fantasies of literary success were all based on doing book signings at Kepler's."

A decade after the founding of Cave Canem, Eady speaks about the ways in which the organization has developed into a "safe haven for black poets."