Article Archive

Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer excerpts from Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk, Bitter Milk by John McManus, and The Lake, The River & the Other Lake by Steve Amick.

When I stepped off the plane in Aspen, Colorado, in June 1997, I found a 60-year-old Hunter S. Thompson waiting for me in a convertible Cadillac blasting Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” at full volume. I was terrified; he was giddy. He was playing the song because it was a part of the soundtrack put together for the film version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that was scheduled to hit theaters the following summer, and he could not have been happier.

The standard recompense for winning a literary contest is typically one of the following: money, publication in a literary magazine or a book, and a certain amount of recognition, but some rather unusual awards are handed out each year that don’t fall within the usual “money plus publication” category.

I am in the middle of Don Quixote—where many writers are and, according to Cervantes scholars, where every writer should be. I’m reading it because this year marks the 400th anniversary of its publication. I would like to say that I’ve finished it, but I cannot. The Quixote, as it is affectionately referred to by die-hard fans, is not something you finish. It’s something you rattle around in.

Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer excerpts from Pinkerton’s Sister by Peter Rushforth and Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil by C.D. Wright.

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 Diner, the Massachusetts Review, Night Train, the Women’s Review of Books, DoubleTake, the Oxford American, and Cranky Literary Journal.

Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer excerpts from Home Land by Sam Lipsyte and The Celestial Jukebox by Cynthia Shearer.

The biweekly magazine Kirkus Reviews publishes pre-publication book reviews, offering professional opinions of approximately 5,000 titles per year. But the tables have turned on the 72-year-old publication as writers and publishers offer their own appraisals of its recent decision to charge money for some book reviews. 

Despite the fluctuating aesthetics and ideologies espoused by critics, professors, and practitioners of poetry, there remain two general subjects that consistently offer poets inspiration: love and war; but with walentine’s Day just around the corner, three new anthologies of love poems are offering readers a respite from verse about violence.

Despite the numerous prestigious awards given to published short story authors, recent news of short fiction contest administrators and judges failing to choose a winner have left emerging writers wondering, "What about me?"

In the world of hip-hop, Lewis Turco would be considered an “Original Gangsta,” an “O.G.”—a title given to someone who started it all. In the more genteel business of poetry writing, however, Turco would be called an “Institution,” and what he started was nothing less than a renewed appreciation of poetic forms. Since its first edition in 1968, his reference book The Book of Forms has become a standard text for poets of all stripes. A cross between The Joy of Cooking and According to Hoyle for poets, Turco’s text remains a rarity: a reference book with personality. Turco’s lucid, empathetic entries on every form under the sun continue to serve many poets writing their first pantoums or settling drunken bets on the rhyme scheme of the rimas dissolutas (abcdef abcdef ghijlk ghijlk ..., if written in sestets).

Page One features a sample of titles we think you'll want to explore. With this installment, we offer an excerpt from Torture the Artist by Joey Goebel.