Article Archive

Earlier this month Chronicle Books published Severance, a book of extremely short stories, each told from the point of view of a person who has been decapitated. Nicole Brown Simpson, John the Baptist, and Cicero are among the narrators. But Severance isn’t the work of some drooling, maniacal scribbler. In fact, the author, Robert Olen Butler, has published over a dozen books of fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain (Henry Holt, 1992).

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 the Paris Review, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the Iowa Review, and Speakeasy.

Let me be the last—the absolute dead last—to point out that we're in the midst of a memoir craze. My favorite form of procrastination used to be computer solitaire, but now I prefer to chat on the phone with my writing friends and discuss the ongoing boom in autobiographical literature. We speculate like housing developers prognosticating on the real estate market. Will the bubble pop? Will prices continue to rise? Will market trends ever again veer toward literary fiction?

Two weeks after he was chosen to succeed Ted Kooser as poet laureate, Donald Hall spoke about his newfound responsibilities.

As the number of poetry readings in communities across the country continues to grow, a format that was once relatively rare—the marathon—is becoming increasingly popular.

Workman Publishing imprint Black Dog and Leventhal reissues King Lear and Macbeth, the illustrated Shakespeare plays originally published in the 1980s—before graphic novels acquired a mainstream audience—as part of its Graphic Shakespeare series.

Novelist and memoirist A. M. Homes investigates how an author's Web site should look and function.

Whether you create it yourself or hire a designer, developing an author Web site is one of the best ways to promote yourself and provide an authoritative source for readers to discover your work.

Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Blue Moon Books, Soft Skull Press, Grove Press, Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Clear Cut Press, and Broadsided Press.

For the second installment of this occassional feature, in which we ask authors to list the movies, music, artwork, and books that inspired them during the course of writing their new books, we asked two-time Booker Prize–winning author Peter Carey, whose ninth novel was published by Knopf in May, for his list; he replied with this essay.

Penguin and the National Basketball Association (NBA) recently teamed up to launch a literacy campaign featuring the retired Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Ray Allen of the Seattle SuperSonics, Dwyane Wade of the Miami Heat, and Becky Hammon of the New York Liberty, a team in the Women's National Basketball Association.