Article Archive: News and Trends

When New Rivers Press announced that Ron Rindo of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, was a winner of the 2003 MVP Competition this past summer, some of the approximately six hundred entrants were perplexed. The guidelines stated that the contest, which awards three $1,000 prizes and the publication of three book-length manuscripts, was open to emerging poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers. Rindo, who won for his short story collection Love in an Expanding Universe, had previously published two books, both with New Rivers Press.

Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer excerpts from A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader’s Reflections 0n a Year of Books by Alberto Manguel, The Secret Goldfish by David Means, and A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews.
 

A recent headline in the New York Times Book Review declared, “Books Make You a Boring Person.” Many would disagree with that statement, but few would go as far as the folks in the marketing department at Penguin UK. The London-based arm of the venerable publishing house has begun to advertise its books as dating aids. According to Penguin, you’re not good looking—or Good Booking—unless you’re holding a book.

Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, “Does there not exist a high ridge where the mountainside of ‘scientific’ information joins the opposite slope of ‘artistic’ imagination?” This was, of course, a rhetorical question, but Nabokov’s own life proved that this connection indeed exists. A dedicated lepidopterist (one who studies moths and butterflies), Nabokov not only held a post at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, he also wrote Lolita, a classic of 20th-century literature. I was recently reminded of Nabokov’s butterflies in, of all places, a dead man’s apartment in Boston.

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Future Tense Books, Manic D Press, Akashic Books, Nightboat Books, and Autumn House Press.

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.

Appearing in someone else’s memoir is like appearing in someone else’s dream. Your role is scripted according to the vagaries of the author’s memory and subjected to the Rorschach test of the heart. This utter lack of editorial control is the second thought I have on learning, in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, that the son of my late ex-husband has published a memoir of his father, the poet William Matthews.

Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer excerpts from Invisible Bride by Tony Tost and Coin of the Realm by Carl Phillips.

Next month millions of writers, scholars, and readers will take part in the centennial celebration of Bloomsday, attending readings, lectures, performances, exhibitions, film screenings, writing workshops, and other events planned in cities around the world.

Thirty-five years after the author's death, the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac's most popular novel and other Kerouac memorabilia are back on the road. Two traveling exhibits—one of which is already under way, the other about to begin—aim to bring the Beat generation's most indelible icon to the masses.

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Contact Editions, Hours Press, Clear Cut Press, Gaspereau Press, and Luquer Street Press.

Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer excerpts from Some Great Thing by Colin McAdam and You Remind Me of Me by Dan Chaon.