Article Archive

It used to be that when a writer bestowed human qualities on an animal—the ability to speak, for instance—it almost always meant trouble. Today, animal lit is broader in scope and occasionally even benevolent in nature.

In an effort to promote scientific literacy, foster an appreciation of the humanities, and encourage readers to make "informed and imaginative connections" between the sciences and the arts, New York City–based Vernacular Press recently launched a series of books titled "Categories."

The second annual Story Prize ceremony, held at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium in late January, began like most literary events in New York City—with much chattering among publishing folk, rising in volume until the lights went down and a hush descended on the room. The evening’s format was simple. The three finalists, fiction writers Jim Harrison, Maureen F. McHugh, and Patrick O’Keefe, would each read from their books and then sit for a short discussion with Larry Dark. In 2004 Dark, the former O. Henry Prize Stories series editor, launched the prize with Julie Lindsey in an effort to promote a genre they believed was underrepresented by other literary awards. The winner of the first annual prize was Edwidge Danticat for The Dew Breaker (Knopf, 2004).

The University of Georgia Press recently revoked the 2004 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction given to Brad Vice of Starkville, Mississippi, for his short story collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, which was published in September 2005, after learning that one of the stories contained uncredited material from Carl Carmer’s Stars Fell on Alabama, a book of nonfiction published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1934 and later reprinted by the University of Alabama Press.

Whether it’s a thousand-page novel, a single-paragraph story, or a footnoted essay, the elusive author always offers a complicated—and sometimes maddening—reading experience. But is there more to David Foster Wallace than words on a page?

For those who don’t mind Hollywood versions of great literature, a new series of novels packaged with the DVD recordings of the films they inspired allows for a side-by-side comparison.

Joining the ranks of literary contests that have failed to yield a winner, Winnow Press is the latest sponsor to announce that the manuscripts received for their First Book Award were not up to par; they are, however, offering something of a consolation prize.

In the second half of the twentieth century, a number of poets’ theater programs, including the Poets’ Theatre, which was established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1950, and staged plays by John Ashbery, James Merrill, Frank O’Hara, and Richard Wilbur, provided venues for work written by poets for the stage. Now, a new generation of poets’ theater programs are raising their curtains for plays by poets.

Can political fiction matter? Stephen Elliott, the editor of Politically Inspired, an anthology published by MacAdam/Cage in 2003, and its follow-up, Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction, published by MacAdam/Cage this month, casts his vote in the “definitely yes” column.

As long as there has been war, there have been writers trying to understand it, turning battlefield horrors into narrative, trying to make something useful out of its debris, but in recent months an unusually high number of soldier memoirs have been released by American publishers.

Images from a new collection of graphic art by Chip Kidd, an associate art director at Knopf, who has designed nearly eight hundred book jackets for the publishing house during the last twenty years.